When An Imposter Dies
by Nazareth Rose
Summary: My vision for a prospective Seasons 6-10 of Steven Universe, beginning two years after he takes his road trip in Steven Universe:Future, all condensed to a 300,000-word work of fiction. Enjoy! (I've worked on this a LOT more in Ao3, and I HIGHLY recommend you read it here: /works/21485128/ Thank you.
1. Chapter 1

First off, a couple of notes. I'm pretty new to this fandom (I've just joined less than a month ago), so I probably won't have everything right. However, I'm learning more and more every day. Please be patient with me.  
Another note is that my keyboard's space bar stays down just a little longer than it should after each word, which causes double-spaces where there shouldn't be double-spaces. I'll work on getting a new keyboard, although you'll probably notice this for the first 3 chapters or so. I apologize for any eyestrain this might cause.  
Also, I'll probably update this until December, then have a hiatus to work on another writing project until Valentine's Day, and then work continue to work on this. I aim to finish around mid-May, although I have no guarantees.  
Why mid-May, you ask, when I'd normally finish a fic in a month? Well, this is a pretty ambitious writing project. Not only am I sketching out the plot of the next four seasons of Steven Universe, I'm also trying to fit that plot into a manageable, 100,000 word-long story. Which, if you read the first chapter, is harder than you think. Conflicts escalate when they really shouldn't be escalating, although I've tried to weave these conflicts into a natural part of the story. Technically, if I wrote for 16 hours a day nonstop, 7 days a week, I could have this thing done in 12 hours, but I am a human, and I have family, culture, and lots of other things in my life. (Plus, my hands might fall off.)  
Oh, well. I'm trying my best as a writer, and will always try to improve.  
With no further ado, let's get on to the story. (Also, I did see the sneak peek. I just want to say now that what happens in the show may be different than what happens here. This plot was in the works for a very long time, and I don't want it to go to waste. So I may not be "relevant", per se, but this is my specific vision, not an adaptation of the actual show.)

Chapter 1 Chapter Text

"You gonna leave me alone?"  
There wasn't any response. It could've been the deafening crowds, Spinel supposed, going once or twice over the irony that before, the reason was that there was no one at all. It could've been the noises of the ship.  
Or it could have been the unhearable noise that comes with settling back home. That became louder and louder with every step the Diamonds took to heading back to their shared and unashamedly luxe kitchen. Spinel ended up having to jump up, in a second-heartbeat, to one of the decorative juttings from the wall that looked like an unused Christmas tree spike. The Diamonds were laughing like older women with a bottle of champion and two or so life stories, and that's when Spinel said it.  
"You gonna leave me alone?"  
The black was dripping, Spinel discovered, from her eyes. She saw what felt like tar drip and drop onto her boots. Her head burned, as it tended to do every now and then whenever people walked this far from her.  
Could it be that the Diamonds were helping her already? That couldn't be right. If that were right, then her head wouldn't be seeming to burn her like this. And her body wouldn't be threatening to fall off of the spike.  
But how could it be that the Diamonds weren't helping her? They'd already took her in, revealed to her their unconditional love, stretched out their hands and watched as she bounded her way across them, one by one. She wasn't on the streets, like too many Gems were on this planet. In fact, she was in the most sumptuous building in the planet. On the planet. How was it, then that she-  
One of the Diamonds moved to the left. The light shifted. Her boot was immaculate.  
She couldn't control herself. It was an instinct. She struck one of her hands against the spike, listened as it reverberated to the back walls, came back to her ears.  
It went unheard. She went unheard. She was too small.  
She couldn't take sitting here. She used her scythe as a climbing spur, made her way down, and ran to the kitchen.  
Two minutes passed by before the Diamonds noticed her.  
"What is it?" White asked. All of a sudden, the weight of interruption settled its way on Spinel's shoulders.  
"It's… it's just that…" Six thousand years of emotion. How much of a lunacy it was that it could be unfettered when she needed it to stay in its cage, and stayed shy in there whenever she needed it out with her. So she sputtered out the first thing she could.  
"I was noticing the people outside. Some of them don't look too happy."  
"There's always people that are unhappy." Blue this time, before she went to get herself one cozy object or another. So many things Spinel was exposed to. So many new things, yet ancient things. So many things even she, who understood fully how the Injector worked, couldn't even begin to decide.  
"I know, but something tells me that they're all not happy for the same reason."  
Yellow paused. At least Spinel understood something. Something about this political tangle of wires and thorns. Something about this life.  
"I know." White.  
And White knew exactly the reason why they were unhappy, although that was a conglomeration of lots of different reasons, reasons they weren't allowed to be unhappy about. At least in Steven's eyes, everything was almost perfect...almost. They'd dismantled their armies, stopped their colonization, completely dismantled the caste system.  
Free speech. Free speech, so rampant, including protests, was the problem, at least in the Diamonds' eyes. White and the other Diamonds, albeit about two or three thousand years ago, had made law upon law that resulted in protest upon protest nowadays, although, like crying children after being handed a piece of candy, they were quickly shut up. The candy had been pleading, promises, and one clandestine demonstration that would terrify Spinel should she decide to ask what happened during it. But that was besides the point. And the laws were almost a religion, seeping into their homes like the rain that only seemed to happen to the poorly-designed roofs on Rose's former colony. The rain was good, some said. The rain was sweet, kept them alive. But some claimed they were drowning.  
No romantic relationships. That would be an abomination, and besides, none of them could procreate. Weren't long lifespans and former Kindergartens enough for them? If they wanted to write their own books, they could've at least made them reasonable and not sneak in ideas that would lead them to another war. And unless there was a war, or if one's job was strenuous, there was no use for wearing garments that didn't take after the Diamonds' flowing skirts and dresses...what would be the use for them?  
Before Blue was finished with getting whatever object Spinel couldn't decipher, there was the sound of a single knock, the door's wood splitting.  
It was instinctual. No friend would knock that way. Either it was an enemy, or hundreds of them, which is what the last of the protests turned out to be.  
Yellow and Blue let out a few colorful words in the planet's own language before grabbing their weapons, and, before White could get a closer look at what was happening outside the heartily-decorated window, Spinel had already scoped out that there were at least 150 people here.  
"150?" Charm made a little dance across White's face. And it was also the first time Spinel had seen her smile since they had both stepped in the door.  
It slipped away just as White called for reinforcements, and when the door burst and a thousand and five hundred other Gems Spinel's size all fought their way inside, all of hel broke loose. Spinel did her own part in keeping back the other Gems, but that was before she looked to her right.  
One of the guards clubbed one of the Gems on the head. She fell back, shuddered, and lay still.  
"Stop!"  
No one heard Spinel, just as before. She shoved off one of the Gems trying to get in. It was only when Spinel was on the floor with a shiner that she discovered the Gem was a Bismuth.  
That did it. She couldn't play this game anymore- some words that ruminated in her head every so often. She blew her horn, and the sound of it caused the Bismuth to kneel screaming, hands over her ears, and those close to her to run. All the rest seemed to be paralyzed. The guards doled out a few glancing blows, but that was all. It echoed across the constantly-scrubbed, crystalline walls of the home, creating a horn of its own.  
The place was silent.  
"No one else needs to get hurt."  
For a few seconds, there was only the noise of a few ships taking off, of the humming of generators outside.  
Yellow stooped down, picked her up so forcefully her neck made a popping noise. "And just what do you think you're doing?! You think you can just infringe on a diplomatic operation like this because you don't want them to get hurt? They were going to storm into our home, kill us all! Do you have a better idea?!"  
"Go to Earth!"  
"Excuse me?!"  
"Go to Earth. Everyone."  
That was all Yellow needed. She squeezed Spinel enough to make her arms pop a little this time, but not enough to be visible. White lay a hand on her shoulder.  
Yellow took a breath. It released in the cold wind, released to the constant flow of minerals.  
"Tell me. What do you mean?"  
And Spinel told her, and only her, quietly, about how Earth was safe and how she was a friend of Steven's. She didn't elaborate; anything else would be speaking badly of Homeworld, and that would be very bad for her.  
Yellow took a breath. Another. Another. Then, White, reading Yellow like the storybook she'd had so meticulously handmade, golf foil strewing the floor it was made above, called off the guards. And the crowd, seeming to read the four like the hovergrams- not quite holograms- that were there books, slowly, slowly, dropped back home.  
The door was very quickly replaced by one of the palace workers, and by the time Spinel was kicked off to the side, although no one had told her to go, off to look out of the window on her own, off to see the crowds as they went home, off to see every single thing she had missed for such a gut-wrenchingly long period of time.  
And it was that period of time the Diamonds had to get used to, even if they did joke on it back when they were on Rose's former colony.  
"Spinel."  
It was Blue. Spinel turned. The blackness was still on her eyes.  
"Spinel, deary, you've been sitting there for twenty minutes, not saying a word. Wasn't there something you wanted to add?"  
"Add to what?"  
"Let me take you there."  
And Spinel was twenty feet tall. She looked to her left, then her right, in order to see if the fingers on her palm would close in. When they never did, Spinel still went with unease onto the over-half-a-million-carat dining room table.  
White and Yellow's heads were in their hands for two very different reasons. White was very, very tired. Yellow was the kind of disappointed Spinel imagined Pink to be if she were to ever come back…  
Spinel did what she was, at least in part, made to do. She broke the tension, and a poorly time-joke left her mouth. Yellow chuckled for three or four seconds, although she seemed a little regretful a few seconds later.  
Blue. "Before any of you say anything, it bears mentioning that migrating to other planets is entirely legal."  
"It's too fresh." Yellow rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.  
White lifted her head from her hands, thoughts pushing on her shoulder blades, and pressed both palms to the table. "It still stands."  
White paused for a few more seconds. No one dared to interrupt her. Blue even thought for a minute she was Spinel's height, and then realized she'd had her own head plopped on the table.  
White again. "Blue, Yellow...Spinel...look at our resources. What stands out to you about them?"  
"Allocation and more allocation. Stood out to me during the war, stands out to me now. And it seems like we're running out, despite us not needing nearly as much as the inhabitants of, hrmm,...her former colony."  
"Despite." "Allocation." "Inhabitants." Spinel nodded at Yellow, despite there not being anything for her to look at that White showed. It felt so great to be learning, or at least hearing, something new.  
Another pause. Spinel fiddled with her gloves, although it took her scuffling her boots along the table to bring everyone to attention again.  
"It bears mentioning that migrating to other planets is entirely legal," Blue repeated.  
"And I'm Steven's friend. I'd think it's what he'd want, too."  
A longer pause.  
Only a few minutes later was the verdict reached, and only a few seconds later was the order published to the public. The first part of the first paragraph read something like this:  
"We, the Monarchs of this great and salubrious planet , hereby endorse and highly encourage migration to the planet of Earth, located in the Nyunai Hery Galaxy, affectionately dubbed 'The Milky Way' by its inhabitants. Further information on its location, as well as its biological bypass combination, can be found in the latter half of this statement. In order to make preparations before migrating this planet, we highly encourage you to test for any diseases you may carry on you or your person before you go any further, as you..."  
At first, it was small. But as the conversation between the three Diamonds started again about some trivial topic or another, as Spinel, bored and tossed away again, made her way to the Diamonds' launchpad in order to say one last goodbye to Steven before finding an area to settle in, the ships prepared, in more and more numbers, to leave Homeworld. All in all, 7 million would leave to settle in the United States alone. Most went near Little Homeworld, off of the East Coast of the United States, but the braver ones chose to take a newer path. Those settled in the desert to the west, some farther north, and only very little to the south. Most acclimated to human homes, but the craftier or formerly higher-classed ones built ones of their own. The whole process took about a few months in Earth time. All normal for Gems.  
And it was then that all hel broke loose.


	2. Chapter 2: Povbeitem

In the Gem language, "Povbeitem" is the best translation for "back" or "returned". However, this is a profound type of "returned", as it is only used for long-captured prisoners of war, or exiles who finally returned after the war's end.

The last time this kind of war had torn Greg's head apart, Rose was more than a picture.

Of course, even now, Rose was more than a picture. Now, she was his son, who had grown so much, too much, too fast from when her death was first fresh. And look at him now. Looking at a picture of his own. Looking at a picture of Steven, who then wasn't old enough to get past the stage of his doctor running constant tests on what he described as a "unique" umbilical cord.

And now look at Steven. Eighteen. The wedding with Connie had been just a half a year ago, even if most of the flowers from then had turned brown. The closing on their own house had been done just a month ago. A month ago…

What had he missed? During the wedding, he had been crying, yes, but he'd been crying while thinking about the days when Steven was first using the birch-white couch downstairs to help him walk. He'd been too sucked into that moment, and by the time the clock in him had switched to "now", Steven was laying the home insurance paperwork on the dining table, asking Greg to help him fill it out. And where was he now?

Well, now, he was where he always was. Except now, the baby, the boy, the man that was under his wing was now flying towards the capitol, wanting to further improve relations between Gems and humans. And Greg couldn't help feeling cheated, no matter how unethical it may be. Couldn't Steven be improving his relationship with him? With Pearl? Garnet? Amethyst?

Pearl. Where was Pearl? Off to busy himself with other things, Greg half-put, half-dropped the picture.

Pearl was in the kitchen, but now he remembered the reason why he'd thought to ask- Pearl was walking, bordering on running, out of the kitchen. There was a bag of flour and some eggs on the table- Pearl had always wanted to try cherry pie- but now Garnet and Amethyst were running after her, wanting her to come back.

And in a few seconds, the reason why walked in the door.

Steven walked in, clean-shaven as he could be, now standing a little taller than his father. A vinyl was gripped in his hand.

Greg thought of belaboring himself for thinking of Pearl before he started talking to Steven, but he didn't go through with it. "Steven! How you doing? Aren't you supposed to be in the capitol doing speeches?"

"Woooo, I think you're getting a little hasty there, Dad. The closing was just a month ago. We're still trying to move ourselves into there. Settle in. Buy stuff I didn't have in my room. Like an oven. Stuff like that."

"But why'd you come back?"

Steven shuffled the vinyl a little closer to his father.

"My music! You've been listening to my old music?" Something flew a little lighter somewhere in Greg that he thought wouldn't fly again for awhile. "I thought the last of the fans died off ages ago! I didn't know you'd jump on the bandwagon!"

Steven chuckled. "Well, it's a little more than that. It's just that…"

"Just what? Come on, get settled in."

Steven had only been meaning to stay there for a few minutes to propose an idea, but a few minutes quickly turned into a few hours, Pearl not being coaxed out of the bedroom until Steven got the bright idea of turning Pearl's inhumanly-tidy ingredients into the pie she'd intended on making before; she ate it, said thank you and hello to Steven, and went back.

Garnet and Amethyst didn't keep her from walking on back.

Steven looked a little distressed at the fact that he couldn't find anywhere to put the record. "Has she gotten any better?"

Garnet. "Well, she hasn't gotten any better, per se, but I'm not going to lie… we didn't expect her to come out of her room for a whole lot longer."

"I still want to go and see if she's okay-"

This time, Greg spoke up. "Trust me. It'll only make things worse. C'mon. I need to talk to you about something before you go."

Amethyst and Garnet looked at each other with a little mix of hope and a creeping bit of fear for both boys, quickly gathered what was left of the pie, and shuffled off to Pearl's room.

The rest went to the couch in the living room, and instead of dread, childhood hit Steven, wrecked him. For a few moments or so, he found he couldn't keep himself from starting a reaction that would eventually leave to him crying, When he was a baby, Pearl had used that couch to hold him, to rock him to sleep, to sing old lullabies in the Gem language when the rocking didn't work- the sight of his dad made it slow down enough that he could stop the thoughts, the tears.

"You okay?"

Steven smiled a little, a half-crescent of a smile; the reaction died. "Yeah. I'm-it's just a little much."

"I know. Son, you don't have to visit so oft-"

"You're my dad, Dad. Even without the Gems, why wouldn't I visit?"

"God in Heaven, Jesus…"

Greg never finished his sentence.

"Steven, I don't want to make you upset, but…"

"But?" Steven clenched the cushion under him.

"I just wondered if- if I should-"

He clenched it a little harder.

"If...if I should bring back Mr. Universe."

Some of the most-tensed muscles in Steven's body relaxed; his shoulders slumped, his father having to poke a finger at the small of his back to get him to sit up properly again.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great idea! And Marty's out of the way, isn't he?"

"Yeah! And we can perform in the bowling alley, in the theater, in the donut shop, and hey, maybe even in one of the schools. And maybe the Gems can join us somehow?"

"The Gems… I don't know about that. You'll have to ask them. Ever since the Diamonds released their statement telling the Gems on Homeworld that Earth was great and all and more and more Gems started coming, tensions between them and humans are just...just crazy. The other day, one of my friends in the capital wanted to go off and get groceries at the one expensive place downtown, and they refused business to them because they 'didn't like the color of their hair.' Can you believe it? They didn't like the color of their hair! So what?!"

"Woah, woah, hey…" Steven didn't realize he was on tiptoes until the back of his calves started to hurt. "You're definitely cut out for your job as ambassador, arentcha... You might want to sit down now, Steven, okay?"

He took a breath. "I know, Dad. All I'm saying is…"

He didn't know how else to describe it. His childhood was closing in on it now, and he felt as if a bridge were forming. All he needed to do was to close it. But would he welcoming more friends into his life? Or would people who decided they wanted to form an animosity against him come pouring to the other side?

"...I want to help."

Something lit up in Greg, but dread came back and pulled that something back, kept it from bursting. "You… you do? That's great! That's...incredible! When are you free? When...when are you going to be free? Don't you have lots of things to do? You're the ambassador now. You have a lot of deadlines, commitments, the Gems there, Connie..."

Greg felt the invisible paleness on his face.

"...And it'll be more of a doozy to ask when you have kids, after all…"

Steven saw it, pounced. "But, hey...that won't be until a long time, okay, Dad?" By the time Greg felt Steven's hand on his, because of the nerve damage still existing from the day it went necrotic from the injector's poison, all of the Gems had already left Pearl's room. "Connie and I are still settling in."

Steven felt his phone ringing in his pocket, picked it up. "Hello, you've reached the Ambassador to the Gems."

Not Steven. Not Steven anymore. Now, he was the Ambassador to the Gems. For the first time in at least a few years, Greg looked at his son, and what looked back at him wasn't as human as Greg thought he was. He had to soak that in for a long, long, time, a hardened pier-post soaking in the sun and water splashing underneath it, before he could think of what to do next.

"...yes, oh, hi, Connie! Is it-"

Garnet and Amethyst peeked their heads into the room, Amethyst looking a little more concerned than Garnet. Maybe they were feeling the same emotion- no, not an emotion, a concept. Maybe they were feeling the same concept Greg was…

"-Connie, I'm visiting Dad now, but I'll be in the capital as soon as I can to resolve this. This was worse than what the agencies predicted, how ironic, huh?…"

Greg craned his head for Pearl, and Amethyst flapped her hands back and forth in the air like a seagull's wings, pointed to the back. Greg nodded, waved goodbye to his son, closed the screen door behind him.

The waves. The waves, the swash battered the sand, coaxed the molecrabs out of their hiding spots, tossed them out before digging another hole for them. Disoriented, they moved on and were tossed by the waves again. If they had mouths, they'd undoubtedly be screaming.

But Pearl was silent.

"What's going on? How are you feeling?"

Another wave, three, four, five, made their way to what sufficed as the backyard. Still, Pearl said nothing. Did nothing.

"You want anything?"

"I…."

Pearl shivered. The beachwinds were still warm.

"I think I want a daughter."

A spine coiled in Greg. Two. Three. He had to say something...

"A daughter?! But you and I… you aren't… with anyone, you're-I'm not!..Why would you..?"

"I know. I know. Rose wouldn't have wanted that. You wouldn't want that. I wouldn't want that. I just want a daughter. Always have."

It took five minutes before either of them said anything. There wasn't any noise; no one opened the screen door. There was only the noise of the waves, the constant waves, the wind blowing on the thinning areas of fabric where Pearl had plucked at her shirt.

"I guess…"

It was a breath that Greg had held in his chest for God knows how many years.

"I guess I've always wanted one, too."


	3. Chapter 3: Buchmierchsy

As soon as Steven came back to his chocolate-black, power-washed, glorified apartment in the capital, as soon as he hung his coat on the coat rack, it was as if the world had gone to hel.

There were at least 5 intergalactic threats coming in to Earth. There were always at least 3, but they were minor. They were judged by a scale Steven had devised to be either technologically behind enough for him to be able to reach them or harmless enough that if they were to come to Earth, they'd instantly be repelled after Steven released a statement. But five… five wasn't what either member of the couple expected for the first few years, let alone the first few months. Steven and Connie had already debated, escalating to the point that had they had kids, they'd call it "arguing", about who would do which job. First, Steven would assess how safe it was. If it was safe enough, then perhaps Connie could come along with him. But he needed someone who could assist him remotely, and someone who was good with computers. Both Steven and Connie, night after night, had tried to get it past themselves that this wasn't on account of Connie being a woman. Occasionally, Connie would even take on solo missions, with Steven doing his best to navigate the depths of the GPS system. And whenever Steven was gone, she took care of the visitors in one way or another. In a matter of days, she became the master of excuses.  
There's a newspaper circulating that has convinced at least 24% of all citizens in the capital that the war was originally intended to bring destruction to the Earth under the disguise that they were trying to defend it? He'll attend to it soon.  
After he took care of the first two threats, both from planets entirely unrelated to Homeworld, he was allowed to run with Connie as they both scrambled to get the house together. Respectability. Respectability, they found, was a precious resource in the capital, and something that wasn't necessarily entirely delved from the inside.  
By the time he took care of the next threat, not only was it time to shave again, but it was also time to tell his father that, yes he was sorry he and Connie didn't help him with Mr. Universe thus far, and yes, he could help out until he was needed again. And yes, he knew how much the Gems missed him.  
He played one gig at the donut shop, all Greg's old songs. He felt like he was a god. He was a god of this moment, seizing it, extracting it, pouring out his soul into the audience, into everything he'd been torn away from. He was everything he'd ever wanted to be. He-  
Another threat came.  
Another.  
Another.  
There's been a riot against a Gem-operated grocer, with three others in town already threatening to close up shop and force at least five neighborhoods to have to travel at least an hour for their food? He'll attend to it soon.  
It'd been a little over a week now since his dad had first proposed the idea of bringing back Mr. Universe, and Connie had already joked to Steven about his routine in her deadpan-yet-endlessly-charming way.  
Dawn: Get up. Shove a breakfast down your throat. Check the Omnitransmitter for any new messages of threats. See that there's 5, or maybe 6. Put on your coat and step on the lightpad.  
Dawn to noon: Find wherever this thing may be.  
Noon: Find whatever you can on the new planet that you're on and eat it. If your body starts to shut down from any poison in it, there's a serum in your backpack that Connie, with help from Peridot, designed for you that you can inject.  
Noon to 3: Fight-or persuade- this thing, or things, and live through this hel. There's a portable lightpad Connie designed for you once you're through.  
3 to 6: The second threat. Find it, persuade it, fight it if you have the bravado.  
6: Come back home and eat dinner with Connie. Kiss her, dance with her, tell her you love her so very much. And you do love her. You're just busy, that's all.  
6 to 9: The third threat. Find, persuade, fight. Maybe squeeze in a fourth one if one of them wasn't as bad as you thought it would be.  
9: Come home. Get yourself ready for bed. Videochat with the Gems, or maybe Dad. Curl up next to Connie. Collapse.  
Such was life in the capital.  
There's problems with parents attempting to take two, three weeks off of work in order to participate in neighborhood protests? He'll attend to it soon.  
He'll attend to it all soon.  
This went on for about 3 days or so until, one day, Steven and Connie realized Amethyst wasn't in the videochat. In fact, according to the Gems, she wasn't anywhere in the city.  
"Where is she?" Steven asked.  
Pearl had gotten daring enough to show her face to him, although Steven, even through his crushing fatigue, could physically see the battle she was having with her tears. "We.." she half-muttered. "We wanted to keep it a surprise, and…"  
Garnet. "She went to the capital."  
Silence from both ends for a few seconds.  
"That's….that's nice!" Steven finally determined. "Although she could've scheduled it first, and…oh, no. She can't come now. I'm just swamped, and...I'll call her, alright?"  
Pearl gained enough territory in her battle to speak up. "You could try, but she's...Amethyst. And even if you do manage to get her back here, there's no guarantee that she'll decide to visit like this again."  
"I know."  
Dread already built up to a crescendo in Steven as he, having enough sense to keep the videochat open after a warning from Connie not to close it, called Amethyst.  
A short, quiet groan, a manifestation, escaped from him. He didn't want to lose any of his friends; he knew that. But he also wanted to keep his planet. Would it be ethical, Steven thought, to keep his friends close, but to kill billions? To not be a martyr-  
Steven had to stop himself. He wasn't a martyr. He was doing his job, that was all. And what a job it was.  
"Hey, this is Amethyst."  
"Hey, Amethyst, it's me."  
"I know it's you, ya goof. Who else could it be?!"  
Steven could practically hear her smile, and that smile couldn't help but pounce it's way onto Steven's face. "So… where are you right now? You weren't really anywhere when I called home."  
"I think you know. Although Felix wouldn't let me in, and I'm kind of kicked out to the bench back here…"  
"Felix? Who's Felix?!"  
"You know...the doorman?"  
Steven half-put, half-slammed the phone on the table, ran as fast as his just-taller-than-his-dad feet could go, with Connie on his tail, his door open in a split-second, ridiculously dangerous moment.  
Still, the phone was shrill to the empty air. "You don't know the name of your own doorman?"  
By the time Steven sprinted to the lobby, Connie was already formulating a specific- extremely specific- set of questions to ask Felix. Her mind was a notebook, and it was one of a plethora of a plethora of things that left Steven weak whenever he came home in the evenings to dance with her.  
"Felix."  
"Yeah?"  
"Did Amethyst ask for anything? Or was she threatening to begin with?"  
"Amethyst? Who's she?"  
"The girl that might've walked in a few minutes ago. Y'know. Short. Stocky. Black tank top."  
"Who?"  
It took every fiber in her body to keep herself from laughing.  
"Purple." It came out as more of an exhale, and she couldn't help but smile, cough once or twice.  
"Her? No, of course not… she just came asking for Steven. But we have to acknowledge things like this as a threat. Company policy."  
"Did she know the room name? Stuff like that?"  
"Yeah, she did. Come to think of it, that was more threatening than if she didn't."  
"But what about the time when Mrs. Berry came to have lunch with us? She knew the room name. She came asking. And it was a surprise."  
All Felix did was mutter something about "company policy" before Steven came in, an Amethyst with a little layer of slight shame coming behind her.  
"She can stay now, alright, Felix?" asked Steven. "She has my permission." Felix nodded, before jotting God knows what on his clipboard, the shadows around the room flitting for a bit before going back to normal. Amethyst looked at him longer than she would most people jotting something down on a clipboard, like a thief, before following the couple to their apartment.  
Steven spent about five to six minutes or so catching up, with Amethyst telling him about her plans to join the human Army, the audible smile on her face growing wider and wider with each thing she listed about her being prepared for it. She'd already enlisted Pearl's help in sewing up something special for it, the fabric all slightly tight, comfortable, aristocratic. And Garnet? She hadn't told Garnet about it yet, but she suspected Garnet knew. Peridot and Lapis knew, although they'd decided not to proclaim it on the hilltops for now. And Bismuth? Bismuth had enough war in her life to where if Amethyst even mentioned it, she'd start throwing herself into her work even more than she did already.  
Except there was one problem. By the time the Omnitranmitter signaled another threat, this time from Beta-Nine's self-proclaimed ruler Partvereis, Steven had no idea what Amethyst's uniform was like, or Peridot's or Lapis' or Bismuth's reactions.  
And if it weren't for a little goading from Connie, he wouldn't have known that Amethyst wanted to come with him.  
The verdict? "Ummm…. uh, why not? I normally take hours to do this. Maybe you can help cut it down a little."  
Amethyst, as Steven thought, was no help when it came to scouting. She knew the stars, knew them as if they were branded on her skin, on her Gem, even. She could've told Steven how to route the lightpad, but that was about all. For the hour or so that they walked, she followed Steven's lead, shrugging whenever Steven asked questions like, "Do you think we should go past the formations here, or…." "I don't think it's a good idea to split up, but there is a fork in the road, and I don't know where we should…"  
That was until they stumbled across Beta-Nine's ruler while the both of them were trying to scale a cliff.  
It was Amethyst whose feet scuttled a little, who jumped off first. It was Amethyst who took out what Steven could only describe as a studded cat o'nine tails, something that would make any of the few priests he'd ever met shudder.  
And it was Amethyst who made the cry of "Buchmierchsy!"...the universal Gem battle cry meaning that there would be no negotiations. One of them would die. And the Gem crying it out would do her best not to be the one.  
Steven gripped his sword, but resisted the urge to unsheathe it. He jumped down more vertically than Amethyst did, ran up to her, made his own battle cry, "They could've just needed to talk!"  
"Talk? It was growling at us! It was about to yank us both off of the cliff!"  
One of Partveries' legs, outstretched, a half-vine, about half as tall and half as wide as the cliff they were scaling, raised its head ten feet or so behind Steven. The sense of danger both human and Gemkind have built up in Steven, and it was then that he unsheathed its sword.  
"Alright. But next time, get my permission. We could've not been having thi-"  
The half-vine flung towards Steven, and Amethyst moved faster than Steven could get out a single letter. She bounded, leapt, pushed Steven out of the way, cocked her whip, was flung to the far edge of the cliff, shuddered a little, and lay still.  
Just like that.  
"AMETHYST!"  
There wasn't any hope for negotiations now, if Steven had any of it before. Without hesitation, he stabbed the creature in the eye, making sure to go deeply enough just to annoy it. He was a cross between a human and a Gem, not a monster. In no time, it was hissing, scuttling away off to God knows where, the half-vines nearly tripping Steven.  
And in no time, Steven was beside Amethyst, shaking her even after he saw that she was clutching her head with one hand, but pushing herself back up with the other until she was seated. "I'm fine, Steven! If my Gem got hit, you think I'd be this...y'know...me?"  
That smile went up on her face again for a little while, before it dropped a little, the hand on her head meeting the other on the cliff floor.  
"You okay, Amethyst?"  
"Yeah. Let's just get away from here."  
After a few minutes, the both of them finished their scaling of the cliff. Both Amethyst and Steven had little to no knowledge of the plant life on Beta-Nine, and so they both scattered to the few trees dotting the cliff, plucking off berries that Steven swore glowed green a little when he tilted it towards the planet's second sun. Both of them came back with about one and a half handfuls.  
And Steven ate in silence, unlike what Steven had been used to since he was a kid.  
Steven swallowed. "You...sure you okay?"  
"Of course I am, Steven. It's just…"  
"Just what?"  
She didn't say anything for a half a minute. Steven grabbed the next handful of berries, realized because of the rumbling in his stomach that the glow may not have been a trick of the light. His mind shrugged; he injected some of the serum into him just in case and continued eating.  
"Restless."  
Steven didn't expect any words, and he coughed like he'd never been allowed to cough before in. Amethyst looked at him with a hint of concern. He put up his hand, grabbed his canteen, took a few sips. "I'm sorry, Amethyst. What'd you say?"  
"Restless. I'm just...restless. That's all. I mean.."  
Steven settled himself into the same criss-cross applesauce position he'd used since his father'd first tried to homeschool him as a kid.  
"...I'd say I've felt restless since the time you've left, but to be honest, I've felt it since… a long time. Since forever, in fact. And it doesn't go back to Lars or to Jasper and Lapis or any of that. It goes back to...I think… not the Kindergarten, nope! But… it goes far back. You get what I mean, don't you?"  
All Steven could do was nod.  
"But I've got a confession to make. Something I've done since you were gone."  
This time, Steven could do more. He could imagine all the possibilities. Did she kill someone? Okay, that was a little extreme. Maybe she did something to tick a group of humans off, and now the humans are using her as a scapegoat. Or maybe it was something small. Maybe she helped Bismuth to remodel his room and make it into something else while he was gone… if she did, boy, was Bismuth going to get her own personal video chat tonight…  
"I've made new friends."  
And Steven was hurt. Not a Spinel hurt. But it was still a hurt that drove him to sit up until he was taller, more human than, more than Amethyst was.  
If she noticed, she didn't say a word about it. "There's Arlene, Grady, Salvador- he was a funny one- Dave, Catherine… but the thing is, none of them went to the lighthouse. None of them knew what my favorite games were, or about you, or, heck, even how to say 'good morning' in Gem! They-"  
"Point is?"  
It was then that Amethyst scrambled to find herself on the rock she'd been using to support herself with her left hand the entire time, and sat down on top of it.  
"Point is… I need something. I need to join the Army. And I guess what I want… is your blessing. Because I've got none of it from anybody else. They're done with war. All of them. But not me, I was made after. After! I want- I want to be a part of something that I want to. Not be...forced, y'know?"  
The smile was gone. But now it sounded like she was fighting her own battle with something. Steven quickly realized it was tears.  
So Steven quickly weighed the options. Keeping Amethyst here wouldn't be keeping her safe. And, by the looks of Steven's topaz-powered watch, it wouldn't keep his missions as efficient as he wanted them to be, either. And, as long as she wore some type of armor over her chest, she was safe, wasn't she? Falling off the cliff way back when was more dangerous for her than this.  
He looked back at her a little, and he could see it now. See the restlessness plaguing her bones, the mania.  
Besides, it was what she wanted, right?  
He could be playful now, he realized. He could stand, mime a scroll, pretend to be reading it, take on as much faux British as he could. "I, Steven Universe, do hereby proclaim you bless-ehd to join the human Army!"  
And she laughed, and bear-hugged him as her thank you- his noogie days were over by a long shot- and the days came back, and by God, if he could've been locked in time, locked on this planet, locked as his playful self, with him and Amethyst sprinting, unabashed, down childhood's road.  
By God, if it could all be stock-still...


	4. Chapter 4

Spinel shot her way down to the Little Homeworld's lightpad; it was in the ocean air that she first tasted it. Not in the people that had shot up like reinforcements from a Kindergarten since the last time Spinel had seen them. And not in the stores that had closed their doors, the doors that had opened, not in the little candy shops that'd changed hands under different owners. It was in the air. Spinel knew what it was, and a little ounce of dread crept over her shoulders. There was something crucial that she didn't know about when she first came with the Diamonds, although her concentration was thrown off as to what it was as a group of humans swarmed around her, and Spinel knew instantly that anything that started off with "That's the girl who…" wouldn't end well.

So before having the guts to show up at the lighthouse, she showed up at the makeup place. The first one she was tossed out of. The second and third she received the same treatment, although with a little teasing about how she should remove her tear marks before doing anything else. But-although it could've been because the cashier was a little distracted by her anniversary- Spinel was allowed to grab as much bottles of the lightest foundation as she could and slap some of her Universal Falsepjien on the table, designed to trick any non-Gem species into thinking it was their version of money. She excused herself to the public bathroom.

She never noticed how echo-y Earth voices could sound, or how claustrophobic they could design buildings while keeping them spacious. She stayed there for a half an hour, plastering the foundation on every area of uncovered skin, waiting for it to dry, grabbing a NASA hoodie someone had lain on the ground. She put the hood on, tucked her pigtails into it. Swinging by the clinic, she grabbed a surgical mask to put over her mouth..the only area she couldn't quite perfect. Her hands jumped into her pockets, and that was it.

Here she was...a human.

Or at least human enough to last the ten-minute walk to Steven's home with her feeling relatively safe, although the dread never completely stopped attacking her.

And when she finally knocked on Steven's door, she was so paranoid about the group walking on the sidewalk that she didn't even recognize that no one was home.

Ten minutes had to pass before she pulled off her hoodie and mask and started spraying herself with the hose to get the foundation off.

Fifteen minutes had to pass before the van pulled into the driveway. Greg stepped out, still not used to the fact that there wasn't anyone in the passenger seat, and ran towards the small alien thing in his front yard that was using his hose.

He saw those pigtails before.

"Spinel?!"

Her heart jumped. She whipped around, almost sprayed him with the hose, face still dripping with foundation.

"What are you...doing? And why do you have all that on you and into my grass?"

She froze for two seconds. Three. Felt like minutes to her. She took the hose, lay it on its side, careful not to drop it on its back like a fool and spray the both of them to no end.

"I… I thought I'd say goodbye to Steven one last time, and…"

"Why now, though? And why…. why are you soaking stuff into my grass? I…." He made the sigh only a well-seasoned father can make. "I'll take care of this, Spinel. Just take my keys from the car and unlock the front door- it's the one with the star on it. There's towels in the closet."

Spinel was still slightly staggered that he'd let her take his keys, but in no time, she was in the bathroom, wiping off whatever foundation was left on her face, starting to dry off her legs, desperately trying to soak back with the towels all the water her hoodie and her hair had soaked in. The NASA logo was swollen…

There was a knock on the door. "You done?"

"Almost." Spinel gave up on the hoodie, gave it and the towels that she didn't use to catch the water dripping from her hair to Greg.

She sat on the couch, her thoughts almost overwhelming her, and she gave an instinctual tug on her pigtails for a moment.

What was she doing? She couldn't go on like this. She wasn't ever going to patch up her relationship with Steven, or anyone else on this planet. Hel, she couldn't even repair her relationship with the planet- she probably chopped off its lifespan by at least a few hundred years with her tomfoolery. And it wasn't like she could go back to the Diamonds...she barely escaped being poofed at the literal hands of Yellow last time.

And it was then that she found out why her thoughts were especially overwhelming this time.

That was the reason why Pink had wanted to leave them so much.

That was the reason why Pink had wanted to leave them so much. But what the strangest thing about it was that she didn't want to cry, or scream, or laugh, or jump up and down. Could she have had enough of Pink? But she couldn't, wouldn't have enough of Pink! She tugged her pigtails again…

"Spinel?"

Greg had already positioned himself next to her with a mug of something hot in his hand.

"What's that?"

"It's called coffee. I have more in the kitchen, if..."

She touched a finger to the mug, put her finger in her mouth for a bit and took it out again. "No, thank you."

A few seconds pause. The ocean waves were in the corner of Spinel's eye.

"Spinel, can you please start from the beginning?"

"The beginning of what?"

"Okay. Why are you here? Why were you dressed like that? What are you doing in my front yard? Why-"

"I can't answer more than one-"

He took a breath. A long one.

"Why are you here?"

"I'm here…" Spinel felt the need to repeat herself, felt for just a moment that Greg was beneath her. Regret pounced on her, clawed at her chest. "...to say...goodbye to Steven."

"But why now?"

"Why not now? I haven't been gone for a very long time, haven't I?"

"I guess not. I mean, the Gems have been around for a pretty long time, so who am I to say what's long in that respect…"

"I guess… I mean, I've only been gone for… when I was last here, that small thing on the clock was pointed to 5, and the big thing was pointed to 1, so the big thing shouldn't have moved that far yet, right?"

"What?"

"I said, that small thing on the clock was…"

"I know what you said. Spinel, let me bring the clock here."

Greg got up, leaving a crop circle of coffee from the bottom of the cup on the couch, and Spinel couldn't help but to stare, and to think again of her walk on the boardwalk. She could point something out now, a torch in a cavern. She could point out its milky glow, and with every detail, it got brighter. The donut shops...some were new, some she remembered from their search for Amethyst were now something else… brighter. The people were a little taller now, and there were new people, very, very tiny people, that Spinel didn't recognize...brighter. And the flowers, the flowers were growing again, and some were new, and with different patterns Spinel couldn't even imagine… brighter.

The clock came...brighter.

"So, when you left, the small hand was on the 5…"

It was called a hand. Now that was strange..

"...and the big on the 1, right?" Greg's finger left the slightest coffee mark on the clock, although Spinel couldn't voice that. She couldn't voice anything right now.

"But there's a number under it, Spinel. In the center, here."

The waves crashed against the shoreline.

That number had been two digits lower than Spinel saw now.

"Spinel…it's been two years."

Aaaand that's it for at least this fic until New Year's 2020! Sorry that it ended with so many literal unanswered questions. This chapter was originally going to be at least 3 times longer than it is now, with no other good stopping point. And I didn't want to deprive you guys of the entire chapter all the way until New Year's.

See you guys then!


	5. Chapter 5

Ok… I'll take back what I said last time. The hiatus will now only be until December 15.  
The reason why I said I was going to put this fic on hiatus in December was that something was going to happen in one of my other fandoms I thought would make good fic fodder. However, there was a change in plans, and while I *might* be making a poem or two about that, most of the fic fodder will be saved until… I'm not sure, actually, but the only thing I know for now is that by the time it'll be released, I'll be done with this fic. BUT THAT CAN CHANGE. Don't worry, I'll update you if it does!  
Without any further ado, back to reading.  
(that is, when i finish the chapter i left off on.)


	6. Chapter 6

First of all, I was done with my hiatus awhile ago. I'd just kept it to AO3 for awhile. But now, seeing as people like it, I'll move it here! If people read it, I'll post more and more chapters. Please review! From what I've seen, this fandom is not as good at it as others are.

And Spinel sat there. Like a statue, except for the fact that statues didn't rustle their hands through their hair.  
A half a minute passed without her saying anything. Knowing far better than to ask if she was okay, he started to make the calls, starting off with the ones who'd yell at him the loudest if they saw Spinel sitting on their couch. Of course, Pearl was the first to come home, with Amethyst and Garnet coming a little while afterwards, groceries in hand, Amethyst having told Garnet during that time that Steven had given her his blessing to join the army . There was the sound of Amethyst dropping her bags, and a little sigh from Garnet as she moved to pick them up. But soon, there was a crowd around the living room, and something icy crept up on Greg's shoulders. This was the almost-exact way that the group gathered around the living room during Christmas, or Steven's birthday, or when Steven was still on the tail end of recovering from injuries that his mother's tears quickly shushed, mended from the inside out.  
Spinel adjusted herself on the couch.  
Greg began once the ocean waves started to be louder than anything happening inside the house. "Alright. Everyone, I want to be the one to explain why she's here, okay? She's a little shaken up right now."  
Pearl stiffened, put her weight on her tiptoes before going back again. "I don't think you should speak for her. She came here. She should do the talking. And, besides, what is she even doing here?" She threw out her hand, took it back in before she realized what she was doing. "We can't just...let her in like this after what she did last time! She just came down from the Diamonds, and they could've put her in as a spy...Christ's sake, is that how…? " Greg shook his head slightly, very slightly.  
Amethyst was silent, but looked like the hardwood floor was suddenly much more interesting than before. That type of talk from humans would get Gems like her "messed up", as she'd say it, but at the same time, a part of her she didn't necessarily delight in felt Pearl was completely right.  
:"No," Greg said. His voice was very soft, almost soft enough that the waves could tuck it in in the seabed. "No. That's not how it happened. Do…" he looked at Spinel, who looked back at him with the tar-marks down her eyes before looking back at no one in particular. "Do you know how time works in the Diamond court? It must be different than how time works here."  
"Who wants to know?" asked Garnet out of reflex.  
"I want to know," said Greg out of reflex, before Spinel even thought of squeezing any words from herself.  
Garnet sat down in the nearby bench. She was tall enough then so that everyone, Amethyst being a possible exception, didn't have to stoop down, but short enough so that Amethyst and Pearl had to clear a path for her in the middle so Greg could see her.  
"It's not about how much time passes. If that were true, then whenever Steven and Connie would go there, time would pass indefinitely here. It's about time perception. Gems first came into existence a...a very long time ago."  
She threw down a hand on the bench before realizing it.  
"Anybody's mind would collapse if they had to experience so much time consciously. So much time and life turns into something like a day that won't seem like it'll ever end. Here on Earth, it's different. But on Homeworld, they can throw a ball for what seems to be a few hours, and in fact is probably… probably…" her hand faltered-  
"4 years exactly." Pearl couldn't help but smile in a way that spread to Spinel for a reason none of the two could quite pinpoint.  
"4 years. So that settles it." Garnet stood.  
Greg. "Right, right. I think what happened…" he could practically feel Pearl forming a counterargument. "I think what happened is that Spinel went to Homeworld on the Diamond ship, right? Then, she went there for a little while and wanted to come back here and come back one last time before the Diamonds knew. Except she wasn't just there for a little while."  
"Sounds like that's how it was."  
Everyone whipped their eyes at Spinel. Spinel had spoke. She made a little gasp-just a little more than an exhale-gripped at the couch's edge, and slowly crouched down in the couch before sitting face forward.  
Pearl then pounced her gaze back on Greg. When Greg realized it and made eye contact, Garnet and Amethyst knew they didn't have anything more to do than to put away the groceries, maybe hide in Amethyst's room for awhile and play some rounds of Galaga.  
Because then, the courtroom was adjourned.

"I must be out of my mind. You must be out of your mind."  
That was the last thing Pearl said before going to Garnet and Amethyst and telling them an overexaggerated version of what happened. And here Spinel was, sitting forty-five minutes later, in a bedroom. Not Steven's bedroom; that would be heresy. She didn't have anything to unpack, and neither did she know what humans normally did when unpacking and moving into a new place. She didn't know what Amethyst had told her when talking about a "poster" or a "roller bag".  
But Pearl and Greg knew.  
And Greg especially knew that if they were going to survive the six months that Spinel was going to be there, then he'd have to do some major lobbying. Maybe just stop over at Steven's condo one day, ask him for a few pointers…  
The conversation had started something like this.  
"Pearl, why not send her back to the Diamonds?"  
She took a breath without needing to; in moments like this, it was clear as to why humans needed oxygen. It cleared their heads. And when her head was cleared, she saw the consequences of tens of thousands of years unfold in it.  
Telling him about Rose's past, at least to this extent? He knew that she was a Diamond and that she rebelled against them in the beginning. But there was something that had a pernicious, inherent ugliness to it. Pearl found that nobody could shake it off. Pearl found that nobody could shake off her memories. Nights of Rose...never Pink...wanting to sleep with her in the room to the right upstairs, not for the sake of love, but because Rose had a crushing fear creeping on her back that once the door was shut behind her when she was alone, it would be locked from the other side.  
Pearl couldn't unlock that door. She knew it.  
But looking like a motherly figure to Spinel already? That was Greg's role, for the most part. How would the others react to her acting this way? And even if everyone in Little Homeworld were to somehow approve of this, what about all the humans? They outnumbered them 45 to 1, easily, even with the new Gems pouring in.  
What other choice did she have?  
"We can't," Pearl finally said to him.  
"Why not?"  
"We just...can't, alright? Besides, they won't notice she's gone even if she stays with us for longer."  
He noticed the redirection, decided to let it slide for both their sakes. "Alright. But for how long?"  
Pearl made a fist, tapped the left side on her chin. "The average attention span for a Diamond is about fifteen minutes. Convert that into human time and it would be approximately six months."  
"So….March, right?"  
"Yes, March."  
"Alright. But we have to lay some ground rules."  
Classic Pearl. Greg couldn't help but laugh.  
"What?!"  
"Ah, nothin'."  
"Ground rules." More conviction this time. "Rule #1: she can't eat or drink, no matter how much she wants to. She doesn't need to, and besides, if she's going to be here, she may as well not be a drain on your income."  
"On Steven's income," Greg almost said.  
"Rule #2: she's going to have to be the main person to do chores. I could say try and get her a job, but she's the best judge about how that's going to turn out."  
Greg nodded, but there was something only given to him, something almost sacred about him doing more than most of his friends' share of chores. Being without a wife tended to do that, at least as far as he knew.  
"And rule #3: she'll go back to the Diamonds if- but only if-she starts becoming violent again."  
"Nothing else? No...you know, counselors? They have a few in town, don't they?"  
"Can you imagine bringing her out in public? The last time she was here, she wanted to end all organic life on Earth! I doubt that organic life would be happy now, Greg."  
"But that can apply with everywhere else! The grocery store, visiting Steven, going on advocacy trips… is she going to be a complete shut-in for the next six months?!'  
Pearl knew it would come to this. She was dsigned to know it would come to this. But that didn't stop her from squeezing her eyes shut, squeezing the little space between her eyebrows. "Just….just let me talk to her about it, alright? You can later if you'd like."  
He nodded, but almost tripped on her heels soon as she saw her walking out the door, the sea winds making it easier to slam. "It's a yes, isn't it? Just wanted to double-check."  
Pearl looked back at him, almost in sadness. "Did I say no?"  
And off to Spinel's- the spare bedroom she went. She fought the urge to go into Amethyst's bedroom, to tell the both of them what life was going to be like for the next six months, and if they so chose, they could both go to the van and spend the next six months in one of the beach houses on the outskirts of Delmarva, at least a half an hour away from anywhere Spinel would be.  
Pearl realized that Spinel was sitting in the exact same position she'd been in before they talked. Instead of saying the obvious, Pearl chose to say, "Why do you deserve to be here?"  
"Huh?"  
"Why do you think you deserve to be here?" Pearl's fingers clenched in her right hand before threading back out again.  
There was a thirty second pause. A few half-sentences sputtered out of Spinel before she retreated back, all without changing her position. But a particularly loud breeze from the Atlantic made the words jump right back out again.  
"I don't deserve to be here. I've told myself that from the very beginning."  
"But-"  
"But the Diamonds…" she saw the mix of sadness and dread creep up on Pearl, and had the too-fuzzy memory of being taught by Pink the word for this mix, demonikivanie… "...the first thing that I thought I was to them was ignored. But even then, I would've stayed, but..., I got in the way of a protest on the street, and that was when Yellow, haha, wanted me to squeeze me like a balloon."  
It was only then Pearl noticed that Spinel had a hand on the side of her ribs. "I know," Pearl said. "Yellow would do something like that. When Rose was with the Diamonds, she wasn't treated the best either."  
Confusion sprouted on Spinel's face, then died giving birth to a smile. "It's alright. It's not like I'll be here forever. I know who I am here. I mean, back when I was outside, I had to put on makeup and pretend to be human just to walk here."  
Oh, God. Oh, God. This was going to be worse than Pearl thought.  
"I just wanted to go back here and tell everyone...in a big, huge way...that I'm sorry. Not just Steven, how old is he now?... but to everyone else. I mean, nobody deserved what I did, no matter what Pink did to me. Garnet and Amethyst...they're some of the best Gems I've met. Not that I've met a lot. And I mean...if the planet's still damaged, maybe I can still help."  
"Not anytime soon. If there's any damage left, Steven would be the only one to have to fix it."  
"And I'm so thirsty."  
"Well, you're not drinking anything anytime soon. You're a Gem. You don't need to."  
"I know, I'm just...I know it, I'm going to be a drain on everyone. When will you guys be kicking me out?"  
"This bedroom's yours until March."  
"Thanks! But I have one question. What exactly did the other Diamonds do to Pink-"  
"Her name was Rose."  
She gripped the wood on the door and shook until it closed.


	7. Chapter 7

Two weeks had passed since Spinel had first walked in the door.

The Diamonds wouldn't mind, Spinel had to remind herself, as she tried to pull the splinters from the sticks thrown at her when she and Greg went to what they thought was a clear, secluded area on the boardwalk. To them, only ten or so seconds had passed.  
Throughout the course of those two weeks, she found her own self to be...strange. And it was a kind of strange that made her body course with dread. Except it wasn't just a dread that made her head burn this time- it seemed to turn her stomach into some sort of storm that Lapis would summon would she get angry enough. But what brought this dread to her was that it was new. All of this was new. Too new. And by the look on the other Gems' faces whenever she told them of whatever she, whatever her body was feeling…  
She laid out the cards in front of her. The first was that she'd woken up in the middle of the last night, her body screaming for water. Only feeling confusion, she'd staggered out and dropped her head in the ocean out back. Relief filled her before the feeling came back, worsened, and she couldn't hear herself cry out. Woken up by the open door slamming against the wall, Greg saw her, gave her water trapped in the container, the same kind of liquid in the ocean. Confusion burned through her. She practically slapped it out of his hands, drank, half-ran inside ahead of Greg for more, and before she knew it, three full bottles lay empty next to her.  
The second was the next morning, when, without any preamble, she asked for one of the waffles Greg was making, devoured it twice as fast as Greg did, three times as fast as Amethyst did. Amethyst caught herself laughing so hard the chair squeaked, Spinel following suit, the leftover maple syrup collecting on her plate. Garnet couldn't help but smile, and so her and Spinel had a little waffle-eating contest before all of them went to the boardwalk to assess the human-Gem situation.  
And the third. The third was that after three days of living the way she always had, an incredible amount of fatigue took over her, although it'd been slow, creeping up on her. It was completely foreign to her. She wondered why the rest of them thought they were the aliens, when this feeling was stranger to her than any of the plants back on the Garden. She touched the ground with all four limbs, and soon, she was lying down, another term Greg would tell her about the next morning. She felt the overwhelming urge to blink, and blink for a long, long, while. She didn't know this before, and, with fear, would force her eyes open again with every blink. With the last blink, she found that her eyes had almost locked themselves closed, and when she could open them one more time, the sun was shining.  
So strange. So strange! In a blink, she'd traveled through time!  
"I traveled through time last night! You guys do this every night?! Man, living on Earth is so much cooler than on Homeworld!"  
At breakfast, Pearl looked at Spinel liked most humans looked at her, but it was only for a second. "You mean you slept?"  
"Is that what it's called?"  
"Yes. Humans do it every night, although we Gems only do it out of preference."  
"Yeah, but what I did wasn't out of...preference. I needed to do it. Like I needed to eat and drink. Can you pass me that- thanks-"  
Thoughts seemed to collide in the kitchen, theories being made left and right. Some thought they should tell the Diamonds, but it was almost like they could hear the others thinking that telling them any weaknesses about her...about anyone...would be a horrible idea. Some thought of getting her blood tested. Maybe she had a virus, or worse, another alien species had put some sort of biological warfare inside her. But one test laster that evening showed nothing was wrong. There was a small amount of poison in it, but that was to be expected considering the amount of tie spent around it. Just to make sure, they tested Greg's blood in order to put to rest Pearl wondering if humans had a small amount of poison this time and that's why they ate. Nothing.  
Eventually, everyone except Pearl came to the consensus that as long as she ate, drank, slept, and did everything else that someone like Greg was supposed to do and no complications arose, she would be fine.  
That night, she went in the same position she went in last night, with all four limbs touching the floor. Except she found the floor to be hard and hurt her after a while, so she found the big, soft, blob that looked a little like the living room couch in the middle of the room and had all four limbs touch that, too. She found a place where some sheets were at the top and pulled as hard as she could until the sheets stopped going down. The blob was ready to hold her, and she was ready for her time-traveling adventure again. She'd read earlier about this one guy named Marty McFly who was doing the same exact thing she was doing, except in years, and had tried making a few jokes about him.  
"No, Spinel." Pearl. "It's not time traveling. It's your body going...unconscious for awhile. It's strange, I know. I had to get used to it myself. And that thing is called a bed, and you're supposed to go under the covers."  
I'm tucking her in now. Why in the world am I tucking her in now?  
"Okay." She arranged herself. She opened her mouth and made a strange noise. Pearl saw the fear on her face almost immediately afterwards and patted the sheets twice before she could stop herself.  
"And that was a yawn."  
She was learning so many new things. "Yawns" and "beds" and "Marty McFly"s.  
Now to talk about something she already knew.  
"Hey, about all the stuff we saw on the boardwalk…"  
Pearl nodded, fidgeted a little at some lint that flew in her jacket.  
"...it was...pretty bad. I thought stuff that bad only happened on Homeworld. And from what I heard from you guys talking, Steven's helping to fix it…does he know about me?"  
Now it was Pearl's turn for the fear to creep up on her face. Steven hadn't done a gig in 3 weeks, hadn't visited them in two. Here she was, the closest thing to his sister. His sister. How could Pearl even begin to think about that? How would he react? How would he even begin to feel? Had Pearl started to even feel these feelings yet? What was she supposed to feel? Was Spinel supposed to be his sister? Who was Spinel? Who-  
"Hey, Pearl...you okay?"  
She blinked, dipped her right fingers into her head for a second to help slow down all of these questions. "Yeah, I'm fine."  
She got up from the bench, and Spinel realized she wasn't feeling the same way she was feeling the last night. She didn't feel like doing the same long, slow, blink she did earlier. Were humans supposed to just lay here if they didn't feel this way too? It seemed awful boring, but she lay there anyway, taking a piece of her hair and twirling it in her fingers under the covers. It was going to be a long time until the sun poured in again through the curtains to her room.  
Pearl looked down. Without realizing it, she was doing the same thing she'd been doing for eighteen years.  
"Goodnight, moi syn."  
"'Son?'"  
A wave of sadness fell over the room, as the waves lulled the beach face. The moon above giving tides was constant, was an orb to both wave and Gem. It coaxed the waves to life, then lulled them again, a mother. To Gems, it gave them a sign to stop conquering. It was why they had a moon goddess, after all. In the deserts that composed Homeworld, before any civilizations were established, moons gave them light during the night, and therefore, survival. Every planet was theirs, but never moons. They could bar the planet's inhabitants from going there, but the moon would be untouched. A sanctuary.  
"It's nothing. Goodnight."

Steven didn't know what to say. Didn't know what to do.  
But in that, he dodged every one of Pearl's expectations. He didn't punch the computer screen like Spinel had punched him, Connie smiling at his imaginary retribution. He didn't shoot down any suggestions of him coming back to Beach City anytime soon. And, most of all, he didn't blame Pearl, and neither did he blame his father, for letting this arrangement happen.  
But her being his sister? How long had he been gone from his family, from their lives? Nevermind that they apparently had a new addition!  
"Connie?"  
She was bent over the stove making malai kofta, a favorite of her father's, which, for a reason Steven couldn't quite pinpoint, gave him a twinge of guilt.  
But along with the guilt, it gave him an extra blast from conviction's bellows when he said, "I need to go back to the beach house. Do you think you could take over the next mission for me?"  
A wave pierced Connie, reminding her a little of the way the waves bit at her ankles back home, as she realized she liked him. She'd always felt this way, and, by all means, had always loved him as much as she did her family, but she hadn't seen evidence this obvious in a long, long while. She missed that. Turning off the stove and covering the food, she took Steven by the arm and embedded a decisive kiss on his cheek. "No problem."  
In a matter of a minute, she took along Lion and took along her own scabbard and breastplate, made her way to the lightpad, and with a burst of piezoelectric light from it, was gone.  
And it was then that Steven got that same feeling he would get when he was fourteen, that giddy, dizzying, carousel-churning feeling. He realized, for the first time in a long while, that he liked her just as much as she did. It flooded his blood with something more precious than rubies. Even diamonds, he dared.  
But what was even more daring was when he showed up to the public. Even beyond giving speeches...speeches tended to afford him a group of bodyguards, both human and Gem, should things get out of hand. Should he get hurt during the speech, there were medical personnel, mostly Gem this time, on the ready. But in the concrete jungle, so to speak, that was the capital's sidewalks on the way to the city lightpad that could only be exclusively be found in the Gem neighborhood, there was nothing. Nothing except the courage that he wore like a windbreaker in a blizzard.  
Coming into the Gem neighborhood always cleared Steven's head, although not in the way he thought it would initially. They'd set up a dense network of tempered glass with intricate sculptures and LED lights of all shapes and colors, telling of stories from the Gem war, as their barrier. But that was the only overtly grand part about it. The rest was grand, too, but in a way that made the human brain inside him hum and tick as opposed to his eyes.  
It was in the way that they'd adapted to the conditions the humans had set up for them. They were like bones, so dense, yet found their strength in their density. Pillars. Most had a greyish-brown brick-and-drywall space of 300 square foot or so per Gem, 350 if they were lucky and 250 if they weren't, with one right above and one right below. It was the way that this reminded them of the fortresses back home, and to the Amethysts there, of the Kindergartens. It was the way that they took the sometimes-impossible-to-erase words, the awful words graffitied here-a-place and there and covered it with the most beautiful of Gem words, words for "laughter", "hope", "freedom", "new life", decorated with this and that variant of roses. It was the way that they all congregated together whenever they didn't have to be indoors, mirrored life back in the fortresses in those wars long ago. It was the way they spoke almost exclusively Gem like back in the war, sang the songs that were sung back then, played the little games with no supplies involved, that told Steven that he had somewhat of a home here. Something perked up, stirred to action in Steven. Was it his mother-  
"Steven."  
The word wasn't said by anyone in particular. It was more like a ripple. Some were louder- those who'd seen him directly and wanted to say hello to him, hadn't seen him step this way in months. The guilt rebounded on him, but the way they smiled, the way one of them fist-bumped him sent the guilt hissing back. The quieter ones asked for confirmation if it was him. Some stayed, some moved on. He was treated like anyone else.  
Not like a messiah. Good. Very good…  
He made his way through the pool of "Steven"s, greeted the ones he knew occasionally, before the ripple died. The biggest thing that happened is him being offered jablinky, a Gem variant of apple cider involving both brown and white sugar crystals that you needed to take your time and crunch on, savor.  
He stepped on the lightpad and stopped. Waited until a group of humans who were in a graffiti war on a particularly large piece outside made their attack.  
And took a breath.  
Before he finished the exhale, he was back home. The graffiti around him died, replaced by picturesque vendors, some he grew up with and some new, made almost artificial to please tourists' eyes.  
He had a much easier time walking home than Spinel had. Because it was the late morning, he even saw Lars, who was using his newfound Associate's to help run the donut shop he'd worked in for all those years. When he wasn't hurtling around the Milky Way and Andromeda at 60 thousand miles an hour being what the area kids called a "wicked space pirate", that is.  
"I've never thought about it before," he'd said as he handed Steven the customary on-the-house donut, "but I'm starting to use what I've done to tell scary stories. I'm getting really popular now!"  
"What you've done?" Steven was messaging Connie, asking how she was holding up.  
"Well, what you've done, more like. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't've been here to give you that donut, now, would I? I wouldn't be here at all."  
Well, if Lars was trying to get Steven's attention, by all means, he'd won. But if he was trying not to waste the donut he- his employer had made, then it backfired. With Steven's appetite, into the colossal trashcan designed for beachgoer waste it suddenly went.  
When he saw his "own personal lighthouse", like he'd say so often as a kid, turn up on the right, something different settled into him. Not dread, but doubt. Doubt about this entire place. Doubt that the driveway really was the same one his dad had taught him to ride a bike on. Doubt that he and his dad had really put in all those hours fixing the shingles, that it had been in this entrance that Bismuth had told them that surrounding a pipe cleaner with Epsom salt would do an impressive job as a drain scrubber.  
A layer of the dread melted away, while another layer came back twith twice the force when Spinel answered the door.  
"Steven! It's been so long since I...wait, you're my brother, arent'cha?"  
His head was enveloped. It was underwater. Whatever he felt this time, it was drowned by the waves outside. The waves. How long it'd been since he really heard these waves. All those other times, he'd been so quick to go inside and even quicker still to leave..  
"I...guess I am."  
She looked at him. Squinted her eyes like a sandcrab under a microscope. "What do brothers and sisters even do?"  
He laughed a little. Memories of eighteen years of just the Gems, his dad, and him replaced the flood. His head was still underwater, but this time, the water was moving. It made him feel much more refreshed. Enough to laugh a little more. "I wouldn't know."  
He closed the door, knew the way it would stick a little and knew the exact place to put his hands to make sure it wouldn't.  
"I wouldn't know."

Connie, of course, was fine. She'd almost finished the mission faster than Steven would. Or if she did, it was small enough for Connie to not bring it up after the first few weeks. She even encouraged Steven to actually stay for almost all of those first few weeks, almost all the way until Halloween at that point. And if he were honest, Steven almost didn't know how much time would pass.  
Him and his dad did a few more gigs across Beach City, which again lit him with purpose as much as it did six years ago, when he didn't have to worry about things like acne or marriage or whether or not he wanted a postsecondary education. Pearl seemed to be doing better and better each day, which Steven reveled in- as soon as he had to go back to the capitol, whenever that was, she'd probably go back in her shell again. He even scheduled an evening out with her that one of the tourists had actually arranged, but there was a mix of both anticipatory dread and anticipatory hope when Greg suddenly went out shortly after she did. And Amethyst showed him her new love of Galaga, although there was a certain unease to her that Steven couldn't quite shake off.  
Garnet was Garnet, as always. Except she was under threat in more ways than one. The safe word with her was "unnatural". It was the word that the humans around them seemed to love. First of all, the humans loved to use that word to describe Connie and his marriage, when from almost the very beginning, they didn't think of him as anything more than a born-and-bred human. Now, he was an "extraterrestrial being entangled in a fraudulent, immoral marriage." With any luck, they said, Connie would die horribly should Steven choose to have any children with her. And second of all…  
"They're calling me unnatural, Steven."  
A part of Steven wanted to reference just how tough she'd been before. How much of a fighter she'd been. Something like this wouldn't bite at her now, wouldn't they?  
"I don't...I don't know if we can stay fused at this point."  
Ah. Now, he understood. And something told him that if Ruby or Sapphire had chosen to fuse with someone like Steven, or Greg, or Lars, or anyone like them, even that would be received better than Garnet was now.  
"But you c-"  
"I know, Steven. I know there's too much at stake. I just...needed to say something. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."  
Over the course of those two weeks, Steven wondered if it would.  
Tuesday of the first week, they all went out on a limb and went to the town center to look at the murals the local art council had worked so hard on for both residents and tourists. Spinel was looking, looking at this one painting of a marigold, and in two seconds or so, both she and the marigold were ruined by a chucked bucket of yellow paint, of all things.  
That would've been embarrassing enough. It was embarrassing enough for her to come sprinting down the sidewalk, revenge plastered on her face and smile, looking, just looking for the bastard who'd thrown the paint at her. It took ten seconds for them to find her and get her to stop before she covered the entire sidewalk in a trail of yellow paint. She'd came buckling to the ground, both crying out of her shame and because of her feeling like she was covered with "a bucket of dirt instead" for having sprinted up the sidewalk in rage. And that would've been enough. But in the middle of the night, after a good forty-five minutes in the shower, she widened her eyes before throwing up a little yellow, managing to clean herself and the pillow up, and going back to sleep after an hour of pure terror of what surprise this body would throw at her next.  
She was fine after that. Nobody talked about it. She made sure of it.  
Thursday, Steven and Pearl were both sitting in the living room, after having the noble idea of going through the attic and finding superhero comics, unopened by the time Steven was a kid, reclaiming and regathering memories of what the characters were and what they meant to both of them. That was before Pearl grunted in pain and yelled out, "Steven Quartz Universe! You are eighteen years old! I will not tolerate this kind of-"  
"What? Pearl, I've got both hands on the comic!"  
"Well, you must have thrown something on the side of my head, because how else would-"  
"Pearl, look at the window."  
"And why would I-"  
"The window. Please, Mo- Pearl."  
There was a hole in it, letting in a fraction of a whiff of the ocean breeze.  
"Something must have thrown it inside."  
Before long, the entire Universe gang had gathered to the hole in the window, just bigger than Steven's largest finger. Each of them had their theories has to how it got in.  
"Maybe it's Mrs. Harrington again," was Pearl's theory. "She likes to mow some of the grass near here sometimes. It could be broken. Maybe it flung the rock here."  
"Could've been the Diamonds!" was Spinel's. "They all come from rocks! Maybe they want me back!"  
"I'd hate to say it," was Garnet's, "but this could be an attack of some sort."  
At first, everyone migrated to the first theory. But after Amethyst made the call to Mrs. Harrington and got the voicemail that she was traveling to the Golden Coast for the fall, something made something deep in their heads shudder, just a little. But they eventually came to the conclusion that the "attack" Garnet was speaking of was less of something carried out by a formal armed force and more along the lines of someone young, or at least young-hearted, wanting to create a tiny "ambush" of their own.  
Becase Greg was a human, the most "pure-bred" one in the family, he was sent to investigate. See if whoever threw the rock left a trail or any evidence. And eventually, he did find a group of kids with a handful of rocks each and sharing article after article on how "crazy" the Gems were and all the enemies they'd brought and all the problems they'd caused to Homeworld. He tried his best to pose as a tourist, ended up having a knack for it from being surrounded by tourists so often during the summer. And he got a few snapshots. There were 5. Most of them were male. Most of their skins were cream-colored, like Greg and Steven's, although there were a few others who were tanner or darker. And the tallest, the obvious ringleader, had copper-red hair and even a few dying freckles.  
Greg even got the privilege of having the ringleader speak to him.  
"Hey! A tourist-y bastard! Rides are on the other side of town! Fuck off!"

Friday of that week, one thing happened.  
Garnet, who'd been quiet up until that point, spoke during breakfast.  
She turned towards Spinel. "Morning, Waffles."  
Steven turned towards Garnet. "Say what?"  
And Garnet turned towards Steven. "Nothin'."

Saturday, it was the first time they went to the grocery store as a family. Their old grocery store had been bought out since Steven had his sixteenth birthday, transformed into a glorified convenience store. So instead of having the luxury on saving gas on the van, they drove out ten minutes inland, to Germanland, a slightly-bigger town.  
"It's nice," said Pearl, "although it's more crowded than I'm used to."  
Garnet chuckled a little, tapped her chest area. "Nothin's more crowded than inside of here, I'll tell you that."  
For both Steven and Spinel, it was a new set of questions for them, with both of them circling around whether or not incidents like the Thursday one would be as common. Should they pack up their bags and move here? And should they tell Greg? The only thing that stopped Steven's mind from branching out was the fact that he'd spent nearly his entire life back in the Beach City house...hel, he'd even been born, painful as it was, in the back of this van!  
Steven and Spinel found themselves physically coming closer to each other, but having a fairly fast recoil every time they found themselves doing so. They both supposed it was to get ready for a fight. Eventually, they realized that if they kept recoiling and slowly coming back, two springs, they wouldn't get anywhere and decided to play a little game of "Never Have I Ever."  
Originally, he wanted to expose her. To find out anything else wrong she may have done.  
Her reaction?  
"A game! I haven't played a game in a while, haven't I?"  
But as they played this game, Steven realized there was another one, and so did the rest of the gang. Most people carried on with their business, but some of them stared. One even pointed them out and started laughing, but was shushed in a matter of five minutes or so.  
Eventually, they started sharing. "It's a little better than Beach City" was the general consensus.  
Steven had summoned bubbles since he was first a teenager, but he hadn't realized that the entire time, they were living in a partial bubble of their own. People wouldn't throw rocks at their windows all the time, or tease them all the time, or cause him and Spinel to be physically close enough to keep on telling things they allegedly never, ever did. People were kind. People were honest. People were fair.  
Of course, Steven already knew they were.

Thursday of that next week, Connie was here, traded with Amethyst.  
If he noticed, he said nothing. "God, I'm so proud of you, Connie! Handling all of that on your own, that's...that'd be hard for me, and all you've got is my scabbard and..you know...you!"  
"Thanks." A little smile, but nothing to match Steven's.  
Steven knew, and Steven pounced. "Hey, hey. You okay?"  
"Yeah. It's just that...I wasn't expecting you to react like that."  
"Well, of course I'd react like that. You're Connie, aren't cha?"  
"Yeah, I know. I understand. And...I want you to understand that I'm Connie, okay? I can do this stuff. I don't want...an award show, you know?"  
"Ohhhhhh." God, he'd been treating her so horribly. How could he have failed to notice how capable Connie was? How could he have failed to realize anything about her? "I understand. God, I understand now."  
He moved towards her, let her put her hands on his hips, planted a kiss on her lips that lasted long enough for a full breeze to pass by and creak the door. She followed; as soon as she felt his head drooping and heard a flock of seagulls pass by overhead, she let him lay there, cover his face up to his eyebrows in her coat. He took a breath or two. God, he didn't even know what laundry detergent she used, and the laundry room was in his own condo...  
"I'm so sorry, Connie. Baby." He regretted the last word, but didn't take it back. The voice was muffled; Connie took her left leg and half-kicked the door shut as much as she could without hyperextending it. "I've just...I've been so blind. The people around here are just so...trapped, I don't know how to say it.."  
Her brows furrowed. "Ignorant?"  
"Yeah, ignorant." He lifted up his face up to the middle of his chin. "And I guess I've just been...absorbing them. Y'know, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, Mars is the god of war and would probably conquer both Earth and Venus…"  
"I get it. I understand."  
They stood, found a song in the breeze, swayed to it.  
And they both understood it all.

He didn't even know Amethyst was gone until Pearl started becoming more than a little frantic about it.  
It had been three days since Connie had come back. He was going to make the call to the local police, more as a placebo for him than anything that would actually help her, but a little digging and turns out, she was in no danger at all. For now.  
Steven had noticed for a while that no new missions had popped up, but a little investigation found that they did pop up- they were just marked as done. And that was all Steven needed to know. There was no fear in it; he knew, he just knew there weren't any hackers waltzing into the Omnitransmitter anytime soon.  
For one, for what Amethyst was doing, she was actually doing it in a half-sensible way. She'd scrounged up the money and gotten herself into a decent hotel to stay for a few nights. She'd brought some extra money just in case, and made sure to shapeshift and cover up her still-purple skin in order to keep herself conspicuous.  
"Okay, lemme just say it," she'd say when Steven made the call to her. "The human army rejected me, so I'm doing what you're doing. If you don't like it, then come and get me."  
So Steven did. He had to.  
When he did, Amethyst had seemed to be her own battleground, or at least used to be. But her battleground seemed to be open, empty, nothing but a collection of weapons, bodies- Gem fragments, in her case. She'd let the missions accumulate since Steven had made the call, and was sitting on her hotel bed, unaware of the TV blaring at a fever pace into her left ear.  
Something was horribly wrong. Steven punched the power button on the remote before sitting beside her.  
"Amethyst."  
No response.  
"Amethyst. Amethyst. What are you doing?"  
She took a breath, had half a mind to stop when she realized the exhale sounded halfway like she was sobbing.  
"I met all the requirements. Worked out and everything. They rejected me. They didn't even say why."  
It was only then that Steven noticed. Noticed the indentations the marks had made on her arms, her neck, the top of her back, noticed the spare aggregation of crystal-like matter left on it as a side effect of her regeneration process.  
Steven knew.  
Steven knew that whatever was going to happen these next few months was going to be nothing short of hell.  
"They didn't even say why, Steven."  
Steven put a hand on her shoulder. Maybe, he thought, just maybe only his touch could heal her. The tears were dry. Maybe he could be a little bit of his mother again…  
"And afterwards, some of the other applicants came up and- and that's why I'm-"  
"Hey. You did good, Amethyst. You did good, alright? You did good."  
"Steven, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should've done something different, shouldn't I?" Her voice tightened, cracked.  
"You did good. You did so good, okay?" His grip tightened a little; she didn't react. The hotel smell, familiar, invaded his nose.  
He could feel her shaking. He looked down, the same way she was looking.  
Whatever was going to happen these next months, it was going to be hell.  
"You did good."


	8. Chapter 8

Along with all the other important Gem festivals, one Crystal Gem festival acquired from ancient, pagan Earthlings is "Zimna Kolei". It translates best to English as "a cold turning", and it refers to both the moon, after its equinox, " turning coldly", if you will, towards the Earth, plunging it into cold. It also generally refers to the Earth turning cold. Most humans know this festival as the autumnal equinox.

Halloween night, with each Gem with traditional Homeworld garb serving as their costume, was the last night Steven stayed. There was a fairly tearful goodbye, a heavy-handed amount of promises Steven made to Greg and Greg to Steven, and just like that, it was over.  
Just like that.  
The doorman was still there, the condo still intact, which Steven was unutterably thankful for. The smells of cumin and curry, paprika and oregano greeted them hello, and for the first time in a long while, Steven thought of the condo as home. But to be certain, he and Connie checked every inch of it. Connie was about to dismiss Steven as overreacting until they thought to check the mailbox.  
Empty.  
"Empty, Frankie?" Connie asked the post office worker. He wasn't as beloved as the doorman, but they at least called him by the name on his badge. "We've been gone for a pretty long while, and it's not like we don't have a lot of contacts."  
"I know. I know." All Steven and Connie saw then was a growing mass of hair almost exactly the same as Steven's as he ran his fingers through it. "I'm sorry. I don't really have an explanation, but you're welcome to look."  
When they did look, it was empty, like Frankie had said. And when they confronted Frankie again, he, eyes bulging a little, told the couple he didn't know anything else about the matter and a slightly-coffee-and-grease stained piece of paper with his boss' number on it.  
They didn't waste a second of time calling her. They got a puff of air, a slight "hmph", and her saying, "Well, story is you do have mail. But it did have some...disturbing content that we didn't want others to come in and raise a hullabaloo over. Who was the person you spoke to earlier?"  
"Frankie." Connie looked back and, her instincts swelling, made herself completely sure there was no one following her.  
"I'll make sure to give him keys to the back room where we're keeping the mail. You can come up to him tomorrow mornin' and we can sort this out, alright? Take care, now."  
The next morning, they found a mess, a complete tangle of thornbushes and bullets, in front of them that no amount of PR recognition would be able to sort out. Strewed on the desk in the said back room were letters with red envelopes, mostly, but some orange envelopes and a few white envelopes here and there, about 30 in total. For a moment, Connie and Steven wondered if any of the mail workers would read them first, but a quick look at the what the envelopes had drawn on them made most everything make sense. There were ameteur, no doubt. But it still sickened Steven and Connie, who even then had an hour-long discussion of when, what horrible things will happen, what will miss if we have children. There was a drawing of the letter-owner hanging a cripplingly drawn Steven on one of them, the other of Connie being a victim to a firing squad. One had Steven spitting snakes from his mouth and then turning into murderous Gems, the other had Connie being drowned in the river near the capital. This continued.  
30 times each.  
Steven and Connie said their thank you despite it all, although Steven would be lying if he said he didn't have fun taking each individual letter and shredding them by hand and by summoned scabbard. With one, however, he took the time to inhale, to draw breath, air, blood to his head, to the half-brain that needed it, and write down a composed response to who he assumed was the ringleader by all the letters he'd sent.  
But what was even more terrifying was the mail that did get past the mail workers. The next day, there was a letter from mayoral candidate Kiante Boyd, The Great Fixxer-Upper of the New Decade. No aliens, he promised, and we'll keep everyone safe that way.  
"You have an agenda. I have the perception to see right through your falsehoods, your so carefully-placed exaggerations. I will have you know that I currently have over 89 percent of my constituents who intend to place their vote in my favor during the upcoming election. If you've read any of my brochures, then you will know my standpoints on an issue that affects every one of us. Having extraterrestrial brings inhabiting the same territory that we fight to keep in the sacred bonds of liberty will threaten the very values we hold dear. What is not natural is therefore not beneficial, and we've seen this time and time again, and most recently in the global havoc the toxins injected into the planer's core have wreaked. I will not compromise the safety of my constituents. Let me assure you that I have every intention of rather compromising yours."

"Steven, should we think about moving?"  
"What? Of course not, we're needed here!"  
It was a clear, crisp evening when they decided to "take a breather", as Greg would say, on the uniform back porch. Crisp enough you could taste the city's ambition. Traffic rolled. Traffic slammed. Traffic screamed. But nothing could sway and swing away the night from both of their eyes.  
"Connie...it's more like...I'm not sure. And it's not like I don't want to do anything close to wimping out on you or anything like that. It's just that...it's been crazy. Forget I said anything."  
"No."  
Steven reacted the same way Connie would if Steven were to say no. "What do you mean?" A synonym for "give me some evidence here."  
"No, I'm not to forget you saying anything. And you're not a wimp if you have a good reason."  
"Do I have one?" God, he was so stupid.  
"I dunno, do you have one?" God, she was so stupid.  
They stayed there for a long while. Not only to listen to the traffic or take in the night, but mostly to take in each other. They were more important than the night. They were more than the stars and moon to each other. But they didn't have to be touching in order to do that. At times, all Connie had to do was to sprint away from Steven, grab the edge of the back porch's bars, and laugh, wildly, before sitting. But the rest of the time, each other became the air they breathed.  
And Steven took a big, long breath before he spoke. "Well, turns out I have one."  
He took another. Another. There was the sound of at least five cars honking simultaneously. None of them reacted- such was life in the capitol- but it caused Steven's eyebrows to furrow and his face to twist in stress and his fingers to run through his hair in the same way Frankie did, and all Connie could think of doing was to brush his hair back for him. He looked at her. Looked at her the same way she was dressed on her wedding day. And he took a final breath.  
"In fact, I have more than one. There are at least 20,000 Gems living in here alone, and every time I head to the neighborhood, it somehow gets worse and worse. The humans invent new words and new ways to make the Gems look...less than great. In fact, when I was buying you that ring, I had to look long and hard in Beach City to find a jewelry store than wasn't going on boycott already.  
And Beach City...there's even more, when talking percentages and all, in Beach City. There's, what, 6,000 people living there?"..it was the first time he used the number 6,000 when Spinel was nowhere in the room… "...and there's 600 Gems living there. 600. If you hated them, you know how hard it would be to take your mind off of them?"  
"That's not the point, Steven."  
"I know that's not the point, Connie. My point is that they don't have it as well as the Gems here. And from what you and I have seen, the Gems here don't have it well at all. Before...before you were finished with the missions, and you did so well… crazy things were happening to us almost every day. We got paint thrown at us, rocks thrown at us, sometimes fists thrown at us...basically anything they had in their hands, they had to give to us, too."  
Connie nodded. And no one talked for a long while, not until a barking dog being walked below that Gems weren't "reasonably in sound mind" to own brought them back to life.  
"Is that all?"  
"There's just one more thing. Connie...you saw Greg now, right?"  
"Of course I did, he's a second father to me! Both by the law and by how many times I've been there…"  
"Then you saw how much he's in pain. He's 47 now, although what's been happening has been stressing him out so he looks… I dunno… 60. Before I left, all he had was hair loss and a-"  
"Paunch?" She could barely keep herself from bursting out in laughter the way she did when Steven and her were 12.  
"I was going to say...nah, forget it. Paunch it is!" He couldn't keep himself from laughing.  
"Anyway, Connie..besides that, I remember how he used to act when I was a kid. My first memory of him, he'd bought a home gym and was letting me crawl all over it while Garnet tried to act all tough and carry all the weights at once. But even she had to leviitate it, and-"  
"Steven?"  
"Right, right. Sorry. But now, he...I can see the way his fingers don't move right when he wants to tie his shoes. And I've seen the way that Pearl does it, and it's the same way you do mine. She gives him the same look you give me. He has eyebags the size of that streetlamp, way over there. He sits down longer and wheezes more than he used to, and...that's all. I'm just scared, alright?"  
"Steven." She put a hand on his shoulder, the same old way she did whenever she had to say his name more than once. "I'm...not going to lie and pretend everything's going to be alright. And I know your dad doesn't believe in anything, and I'm not going to force religious stuff on him just because I'm Hindu. So all I can do is...encourage. Because if anything, encouragement is what he needs. And Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl are the queens of encouragement, am I right?"  
"I suppose so."  
Just to make sure, Steven pushed aside his missions for the first time he could remember and gave Dad a video chat in order to give him a dose of that encouragement.  
I suppose so.  
He climbed into bed and fell asleep.

It happened the next day, when Steven had just wrapped up his missions for that day. November 15th. The literal universe had been kind to him, given him enough missions to come home an hour early. Steven and Connie were doing their best to prepare for their respective families their Thanksgiving meals, with Steven making crab stuffing with the same recipe his father and him made every year, Connie making a mix of bread and chutney. As always, Greg insisted he would provide the turkey. Both turkeys.  
It was in the air that Steven first tasted it. First breathed it into the lungs Rose had formed for him.  
"Connie."  
"What?" She was laughing, trying to fix a slipup on the oven timer. No, she wasn't stirring the chutney mix for fifty minutes.  
It was in the air that he first felt the instinct to tense up, to move, to do something.  
"Connie, get down! On the floor!"  
"Wha-"  
And just like that, their entire world changed. It came through the back window- it would be foolish of them to try to get past the high level of security in the lobby. Connie and Steven were barely on their bellies, the oven's hot breath breathing onto Connie's legs, by the time the first ten bullets wreaked havoc on the kitchen. Steven screamed, clutched his Gem for dear life, as there was a too-short pause and the next ten blasted through the cabinet, piercing clothing and drywall and pictures. They heard at least two of them smash, and it was all Steven could do not to sob.  
They heard a few insults shouted by a woman's voice, and that was all.  
They stayed there for God knows how long. The first thing they heard was the sound of police sirens out back, the sound of the night collapsing in and around them.  
Three knocks blared. They knew it was the voice of the building's security officer."Open the door!"

Just in case, Steven and Connie were taken to the hospital, even though the only thing that happened was Connie being on the edge of vomiting from stress.  
Afterwards, they tried an investigation of their own, although it took weeks to find who the suspect actually was through analyzing the bullets that had gutted their home and diving into the murky alleyways where they might have been sold against the law and who the vendors' clients may have been. That narrowed it down to about fifty by the time Thanksgiving popped up. Before December began, they would identify the suspect as Mattie Hoagland, a fairly well-known anti-Gem extremist, although it took no small amount of demand from humans to finally give her the sentence of three years behind bars, not four, because of the husband and daughter she was being "deprived" of.  
It was just before Thanksgiving that he made the decision.  
"That's it," declared Steven as soon as the police no longer needed his possessions in his home the way they were when the shooting happened, down to the food. Steven and Connie had passed the time from hotel to hotel, denying the kind offers of those from the Gem neighborhood offering them their home, knowing that would leave that Gem nowhere to go but outside. "We're going back to Beach City."  
Connie was a little angry Steven had made the decision, but knew she would've made the decision herself had he not done so for her. Steven apologized, but they nevertheless began the two-day-long project of moving their items to the moving van, saying a last goodbye to the still-terrified hotel workers and the still-hopeful Gem neighborhood.  
They were over the Bay Bridge when they realized that Steven and Connie weren't at a very socially acceptable age to be moving into their parents' homes anymore. They were known, whether in the capitol or not, as big shots. By 18, they said, they were already married and in a competitive diplomatic position. Stepping down from that could mean things like this would only happen more often. So Connie already formulated concrete plans about the immediate future, with Steven making abstract plans about the years ahead. Connie had already scheduled for them to rent in an apartment precariously close to a tourist trap, but Steven told Connie of a plot of land, empty, near Greg's home. How strange it would be living so close to his now sister.  
"We should do something about all this, Steven."  
"I know. We could try talking to them, or holding informational sessions, or-"  
"That's not going to work. You know it won't. See, Gems are swayable, but humans?"  
"I know. I just...don't want to be the cause for anyone getting hurt, that's all."  
They were silent for the rest of the time Connie drove.


	9. Chapter 9

Steven was on the verge of telling himself that the only reason their unpacking in Beach City was quicker than the unpacking back in the capitol was because his friends were helping him.  
But during the time from the local Día de Los Muertos festival in the church his father's friend went to until the day when the biggest protest in awhile started, what he felt confirmed what he thought from the start.  
He'd missed this place, through and through. And it wasn't simply because he was living in a place that most people in the country only thought of as a place to dutifully spend their vacation days. And it wasn't just for the waves in the back, privatized, that his father taught him how to ride on with a boogie board when he was a kid. Neither was it for the hot dogs he swore came from above, or for the street performers that seemed to only come during the summer and scurry off to God knows where during the fall. It was for something more buried in his subconscious, something more along the lines of how he experienced his mother.  
She was there. There in the way the air tasted here, the way the breezes blew at his armful of black hair, at banners, at beards, the way they passed by his cheek and told him, in their own voice, that no matter what he did, he would still somehow be the same Steven he always was. She was there in the way others would laugh, the way they sounded more golden, more honey-coated here than they did anyplace else.  
And she was there...there in the arresting, the lucid, the always ecstatic sunset.  
And finally, she was there in the way his friends were, the way his father had instructed him to paint when he was younger, how he told him never to go against the grain. How his father told him later that, in some things, it was alright, it was even the right thing to do to go against the grain. How that was, in some part, what Steven was.  
She was there in the way that Spinel thought she was in Steven. There in the way her eyes exploded with light when she looked at him.  
"Greg, Pearl!" She whipped back, let the screen door hiss and close. A memory flapped, as it always did, in Steven, to a day the door was just installed when he was barely 4, how he screamed when it first made the noise. "Everyone! He's back, he's back!"  
"Woah, chill out there, Spinny, who's-"  
Amethyst was the second one to go to the door. She opened her mouth, was at the cliff's-edge of saying something, anything, but covered her mouth. She looked like she was swallowing something. "Steven, I didn't think you'd ever-"  
Greg was the third, with Pearl just on his heels. Greg was the one to burst the door open, his eyes with a mixture of pure, love-imbued joy and disbelief, the thought that this was all surreal as he burst out and hugged his son.  
"My grown-up son, right here" was all he said.  
Pearl was a little more reluctant, but was still the one to let Steven in before everything she'd been hiding and holding for the past months folded in on herself and out towards Steven. The way it always did. It was alright, wasn't it? Steven had always held her tears, and everyone's, the way he did now.  
It was just the way things were, wasn't it?

November 3rd was not only filled with packing bags; it was also filled with group after group of people who had a fire inside, people who figured it was better to curse the darkness than light a candle when it came to their opinions on things. People who seemed that the Gems were out to kill them, people who thought it was best to kill them back, or people who thought it was mercy that they didn't kill them back.  
People who ended up etching the word "mutt" on the front door while Connie and Steven were sleeping. They hadn't even had a proper bed set up yet. Connie and Steven were content to pull out a few of the blankets, go to the living room, be paired with nothing softer than each others' hair and hands.  
"Mutt". A single word all but erased that memory.  
"Connie, I don't-"  
Connie sprinted to the storage room. She took the sander, sanded the area that the horrible word had spread across. Before she went to the store to buy a decent shade to paint over the area, she glanced back at him.  
"Mutt". That was the word for people like him, as far as he knew. He'd heard it a little in the capitol, but had heard it tossed around like an ill-timed bag in the waves shortly before he left Beach City.  
"Mutt". A mutt wasn't human or alien.  
A mutt was worse.  
He considered picking up the phone, calling Greg, Pearl, Spinel, his friends. But he couldn't. He saw the way Greg smiled when Steven did, the way Spinel's laugh timed in almost-perfect sync with Steven's. He saw the warmth in Pearl's heart when he allowed her to help him out, the way he allowed her to be a mother again the way he did all his life.  
But he made a halfway-strategic call, making sure to call Garnet before calling Amethyst so his family wouldn't know. Before long, the both of them were at his house, Connie arriving a few minutes later.  
"Good idea, Steven. This would've taken all day with just you and me."  
They made more trips to the store, set up ladders, painted over the "M". They decided to take a break after each letter, although Connie found her arms were shaking after the "U". So Steven stabilized her shaking arms as she painted, although she told him she was fine after just a few seconds.  
It took an hour, quick as the quicker-than-lightning the town usually had, for them to finish.  
"So…" said Amethyst, her hair matted with paint, "why didn't you tell Mom and Dad?"  
"What?"  
"Greg and Pearl. Sorry."  
"They're not my- alright. But you know why. You saw the way they looked at me, didn't they?"  
Amethyst nodded. "I guess I'm just...not really used to how things are going. Everyone else has been used to Spinel being here, y'know? I mean...I call her Spinny, but that's it. She's the one who started calling them Mom and Dad. Ah, God, this is turning into a therapist session. You don't mind me putting it out there like this, right?"  
"No, not at...not at all, Amethyst." His default response.  
"Alright. But more than her, I guess I miss...y'know...you."  
"I'm right here. You took ten minutes to walk here, didn't you?"  
"I know. I know. I just-"  
Steven knew what she was "just". She just wasn't used to his feet , no matter how little or how big they were, not pattering on the floors. She wasn't used to the way he wouldn't be walking down the stairs. She wasn't used to the way how he wouldn't be the one to take the Santa hat during Christmas time. The list went on and on, but all he did was reconcile it in a breath.  
"Hey. It's just been two months since I left, right, Amethyst?"  
She nodded.  
"It'll be fine. You'll get used to things."  
Things flashed through Steven's head. Things like him and Connie ducking on the apartment floor while the bullets wrecked the pantry door.  
It's just been 2 months.  
And I'll get used to things.

November 4th was Election Day.  
"You going out, Steven? We're running low on food…"  
He stared at the signs blaring at him posted on the neighbors' backyards. People who'd left him notes that still kept him up at night.  
"Not the best idea."  
They went to the couch, put on some movie or another, settled into each other.  
"This is a better idea."  
And Connie laughed, and oh, God, if only Steven could hear that forever...

November 5th to November 9th, Spinel had her first cold. She shared the joys and sorrows, the whoops and the whips of what it was to be human. She went through the hoops Steven went through, but at a younger age. Steven thought it would be better to go out today, to go to the store and get a few extra soups. He fired the stove, made one, went back over to his home. His real home.  
Pearl took the soup, placed her fingers on her temples. "I forgot how sick humans can get." She laughed. "One time, you ate three cans of this stuff. You didn't ask for anything from The Big Donut the whole week!"  
When he walked into her room, her self wasn't bouncy or taut anymore.  
"Steben?" She blew her nose.  
"Yeah?"  
She tried to swallow, coughed it out instead. "I can't breathe. I think I'm drowning."  
"Yeah, I know." He patted her shoulder. "It'll be alright, sis. Just wait. It'll get better. Sometimes, I feel like that too."  
He smiled. Good ol' Amethyst. She'd rubbed off on him at just the right moment.

November 10th, Connie fiddled with a chunk of drywall coming off. "I'm tired."  
"You need a nap? I bought another sheet to warm you up last week."  
"No, not like that."  
Steven knew it was best for him to sit down and shoo away any other plans for the hour.  
Since then, him being somewhat of an intragalactic vigilante had slowed down in lieu of him trying to take care of tensions between Gems and humans. That one word, "mutt", had given him a new pace. But that wasn't to say he wasn't going at least three-fourths of the pace he was before. But it was still nothing short of a wonder that he was able to watch a movie with Connie on occasion, or able to make his sister soup during her first time sick. Now, he had about a half an hour before he left to help settle a trade dispute on an eastern part of Kepler-62f involving a 62-foot tall, sky-blue lizard who could swallow up the whole eastern seaboard if he wanted to. He let Connie know of this fact; she nodded, but nothing more.  
"I'm tired of all of this bouncing around, back and forth. There's part of me that wants to be normal."  
If Steven voiced himself now, said how he wanted to be normal along with her, it would be selfish, wouldn't it? Childish at the least. A very tiny part of him boiled at the fact, but, thank God, was just a simmer. Barely noticeable.  
"This is all empty air. But I just want to be someone…a teenager who just graduated high school, who likes space, who's trying to apply for colleges. I...I want you, by all means. But I...maybe want a different lot in life."  
She smiled. But he could tell that tears were simmering in her own eyes, and one trailed down. In a flash, he saw map after map of Sri Lanka, shown to him during their childhoods in Connie's bedroom, a teardrop just a few hours' flight away from where she lived.  
"But I'm not going to get something just because I want it, don't I? That's the point of all this. The point of all- ah, nevermind, Steven. It's almost time for you to go, isn't it?"  
"Nono, keep on going. It's fine."  
"The point of all the tension. One wants something, the other side wants another. The humans want the planet to be safe by not having Gems, the Gems want the planet to be safe by having Gems. Or for themselves to be safe from the Diamonds. Except both sides- although I'm sure the humans are more of the guilty party in this- aren't aware of something that might change what they want, or at least make them realize that what they want isn't all that's cracked up to be."  
She took a breath, and all of Steven's world was compressed in that breath.  
"And I'm realizing that- I don't want to leave, don't get me wrong- but I'm realizing that this wasn't all that was cracked up to be."

Steven didn't think about it then until Veteran's Day.  
They always kept it quiet in Little Homeworld, with all of them congregating instead to Steven's house. There, Gems from every background would pour their souls out onto the ground and tell their stories, and some of the ones whose minds weren't too shattered reenacted some of the more important battles. Although it was by no means Steven's favorite day when he was a child, his age giving him his more pacifist beliefs, it was always something for him to look forward to.  
"There was a war while I was gone?"  
"Yes, Spinel." Pearl whipped together a batch of piezoelectric devices, the closest the Gems could construct to be instruments. They were made of crystals, nonliving, scraped from the planet's ground, and simply pressing on something made electricity, which in turn, made sound.  
"I'm sorry."  
She took the instruments. Squeezed them closer to her chest. Stared at the water. Stared at the floor when she realized she was staring at the water the same way she'd always see Rose doing at the end of every bad day.  
"So am I."  
For Greg, it didn't stir up too many memories. It was impossible for him to have memories of anything that happened before the mid-seventies, after all. But, if he could ignore the crushing weight of his wife inviting him to come out and celebrate the war he'd barely studied, let alone been a part in, he was just left with this feeling of dread. This feeling that some year, somehow, someone would make it so all of this couldn't be celebrated.  
But he was the first one to notice how a middle-aged man with a black beard and almost ivory-white skin went to the edge of the property line, peeked, shouted back, ran back, and all was still.  
And he was the last one to forget.  
Connie was the first one to come, almost bouncing with delight when asking what she could do. Her parents, very understandably, didn't want to send their child to one of the largest Gem celebrations in months, especially with its theme.  
Four hours later, Steven was greeted with something the Gems liked to call "oprajmozc"- something familiar, but elaborate. There was Pearl and Greg together in the kitchen, making a mix of jalinky and barbeque. But Steven's mind flashed; he remembered spending hours when he was 8 trying to somehow get off the mark that had been left on the table by the barbeque food's heat.  
There was everyone in the living room, a cohort of ten or so Gems who knew Steven the best, showing off Bismuth-swords made for the day, obviously made of plastic. They jumped in sync, the chaos of piezoelectric violins and drums playing in the background, and snarled the Crystal battle cry. They all then came together and exploded in festivity.  
But Steven's laugh was a little more nervous.  
Because the entire time that they'd done their demonstration, made Steven feel that forbidden feeling of being a child again, he noticed someone toeing the property line.  
He was about to excuse himself, but he knew the Gems' eyes would follow his.  
"Who the heck is that?" said Amethyst, being the first to drop her sword.  
The music danced in the house, spun Steven around as he tried to look.  
There were five or six of them now, with three of them clambering up the hill. By the looks of it, their skin was all as creamy as his. He saw only a few that he could point out as women from here; most looked to be about his dad's age, although he saw two or three "littles", according to Greg, that held onto an older adult's hand.  
He didn't even notice what they were holding until Peridot wondered what weapons they were going to use to counteract the humans'.  
The dread turned into a spinning hurricane, the Gems playing the piezoelectric instruments waltzing into the fortissimo of the piece…  
There was a knock on the door.  
"STOP!"  
Steven's throat scolded him. For the first time in awhile, Steven was looked at as, and felt as if he were an alien, even in the presence of aliens.  
"Stop. I'm sorry. I'll just...go get the door."  
By the time he went to the door, Greg had already beat him.  
All he heard was the man's voice, and all he saw was the upside-down sign with blaring red text.  
"...you're taking away our right to this day, 's if taking our jobs wasn't enough. We're celebrating our patriotic duty, but your...these things have caused us more harm than they have good! You know how many of us fought in Vietnam? Korea? Iraq? Huh?"  
Everything in Steven doubled back; his eyes dilated to the point of Bismuth even asking if he was alright.  
"I'm fine, Bismuth. But just...you need to leave. Leave now."  
She looked to the left and to the right. The air of celebration was dying a little now. Some were drawing their stories to a close just as they got to its crucial point. She didn't know whether it was better to sheathe her sword, the only real weapon in the house, or leave it drawn.  
"Alright. I believe you. But I won't be the one to spread mass panic."  
He smiled. "I wasn't planning for you to."  
Lapis and Peridot were the ones who were looking for Bismuth, and Steven hesitated before telling Peridot. For the first five minutes, Peridot panicked, Lapis flapping her hands and trying everything she could to get her to stop, telling at least eight more Gems what Steven had said. Steven grimaced, sucked in a breath full of air as the Gems went to him, asking if this was true.  
"Yeah. Yeah, it's true. But we need to keep it quiet, OK?"  
Something more from the door. "...well, we're just about TIRED of it, if you'd ask me. And we won't be pushed 'round anymore…"  
So Steven made his way around the house, half sprinting, smacking his hip on the corner of the wall. He held it and winced while dodging every single "are you alright", telling them the same thing. "All of you need to leave. But keep it quiet. Out of the back door."  
And by the time the protestors had moved to the back door and locked Steven out from his terrified family indoors, about 60 percent of all the Gems were safe back at home.  
It lasted forty minutes.  
Steven wanted, with every inch of his being, to lash out. But he was used to keeping that contained now.  
But other than being a buffer, a barrier, even summoning his shield for the bigger Gem crowds, he was also the wave that was hitting the buffer. He darted into the crowd, even used his shield to shove them, too, out of the way, having insult after insult hurled at him, punch after punch being targeted at him. By the second time he did it, the words "mutt from Mars", the new phrase people thought it would be fun to call him, spun around in his head again. And he only stopped the third time when someone with glittering teeth and a faded red t-shirt punched him the same place in the nose that Spinel did. He heard a sickening, pounding crunch that turned his world into blurry lights. He stepped back, cried out. The Gems around him all gathered, made concerned half-yelps, and he summoned everything he could to let the tears fall. By the time the tears made it to the grass and disappeared, so did the pain.  
"Steven."  
He looked up, felt a mask around his lip from what what'd managed to bleed from his nose, wiped it.  
"Garnet! Thank the Lord! How'd you get out here?"  
"That giant shield you have? I'm much the equivalent of that."  
"Right, right."  
"Come on. We're not safe here."  
"And neither are all the Gems still here."  
She made the same "hmm-mmm", the same hand-tilt, that she always made whenever mulling something over. "Alright. As long as you don't keep too far out of my sight. You know how Pearl and Greg will feel if I leave you behind."  
"Pearl and Greg?" Something tightened in him, pulled him up to the Big Dipper floating above.  
"What?"  
"Before, you'd always say…'Pearl' or 'Greg', not 'Pearl and Greg.'"  
"Nobody told you, did they?"  
"Told me what?"  
She paused, acted like she was holding a whale down inside of her. "We should focus, Steven."  
"Right. Right."  
He pulled out his shield, still feeling the same ever-pressing tug, still doing the same thing he would have done if this had happened seven years ago.  
It was midnight before this hell was completely cleaned up. The house was kept from being ransacked as much as possible, but it still took hours to clean up, even with everyone helping, with the exception of one. Greg had gotten away with only a few bruises, but the fact that he'd gotten one on his leg made it all the more pronounced. Connie, Greg told Steven, had managed to get to the van in the back and drive home in a mad dash before anyone else could even think to call her name. Keep her, Greg told Steven.  
"Spinel?" Greg this time, although Pearl must've been halfway across the room when she started coming on Greg's heels. "You okay? You've been breathing like that for awhile now."  
The way she was breathing reminded Steven of the rabbit that was part of the petting zoo one year during the summer on the boardwalk. He was the one to sit down, to put his hand on her far shoulder, to even brush the pigtail that flopped in his face instead of putting it behind his back after a bit.  
"This…"  
That was all the words they got out of her for half a minute. The other half of a minute, they found a more dutiful, newer Gem that had just immigrated a month ago and told her that the mess inside was worse than the one outside for now.  
"This was what Homeworld was like."  
Greg said nothing else, but it was as if a latch were unlocked to Steven. Memories of being thousands of years under their control, of the amount of riots that had been crushed with the effort of only a few Quartzes. The Gems were shattered, the shards swept to the streets like they were dust from the weapons the Bismuths forged…  
Garnet turned to the Gem. "Is this true?"  
The Gem turned pale, if she could, and nodded.

"Rose, what am I doing? What the hell am I doing?!"  
She didn't know what the hell she was doing, either. She'd sequestered herself to one of the buildings that were closed in the summer, knowing the owner was an old woman who could do little more than politely ask her to leave, given her personality. Rose only seemed to speak to her that way- when she was away from Steven, away from the influence of anyone or anything that could affect her subconscious. That could affect the message.  
But that didn't explain why she was shaking, or the fact that she'd dare to kiss him, kiss the man that she'd been, in a sense, been courting since the first day Steven was alive, even if she hadn't known it. They'd been friends, but it gave her a thorn in her chest or her side each time they did something, anything, that was similar at all to the way Rose interacted with Greg.  
It was, in a sense, why she'd ignored him the first month of Steven's life.  
She cried out, but only because the way it echoed across the empty shelves and poster-free walls reminded her of how strong that battle cry used to be back in the war. It couldn't be like this. Wouldn't be if she could help it. But how could she help it? Spinel hadn't been gone from the palace for even two months. She sat down, ran through the sand-pattered roads of town in her mind; the pearl on her forehead hummed, very quietly, in the dead silence. She could somehow evacuate Spinel, take her to one of the beach houses before taking her further inland and living in one of the townhouses there. But with what money? Greg would know. The fact that he was slaving at the car wash would make him especially know. And with Steven's? She couldn't bring herself to do that. Not after having lesson after lesson with him on being honest, even when it doesn't benefit you.  
And Spinel would never forgive her. She'd think that Pearl forced her to be away from everyone else at the house.  
Pearl shook. Shook out a breath.  
"Free me from this."  
That's all she had to say. The ever-seeming-to-pick-up winds blew and battered at the door.  
"I don't want to be where you were."  
Well, Rose seemed to say, it's not like I'm here to be what I was, isn't it?  
"I know."  
She lowered herself to one of the cardboard boxes left over, situated herself until she was finally comfortable.  
I'm not here to be what I was.  
And that was the part that made her shake one more time, and make the tears fall.


	10. Chapter 10

They spent the first half of the next day cleaning up wheatever they couldn't yesterday, having been robbed of the time by their need to sleep. Once those who needed to went to bed, Pearl and Garnet tried cleaning up a little more, but Pearl eventually found it awkward and started going between hiding in her room, weighing the pros and cons of calling Steven and Connie at this hour, and helping Spinel not feel so confused as she tried to fall asleep. Garnet stayed until the crack of dawn, but everyone knew from the start that this mess was beyond one or two people.  
November 21, however, was a different story. Connie mentioned to Steven that the Omnitransmitter was quickly filling up with missions, but Steven repeated to her how they were all optional. He then got out his laptop and started to type.  
"Steven! You can't just spend your time going on the Internet and-"  
"It's different, Connie. Look."  
Connie took the time to look, the moonbeams stretching over her eyes the same way he noticed when they were playing together as pre-teens.  
He was typing a speech.

He tried the easiest level that evening, mainly as a rudimentary start. To see if he was reaching his audience with the content of the speech, to see if his voice was clear enough, blah blah blah. But more than that was the reactions the Homeworld Gems, ever more becoming secluded from the small concentration of the Crystal Gems, to him saying this.  
"Are you CRAZY?!" exclaimed Peridot, ignoring the way she was jumping a little. "Engaging the humans like this?! Man, have you got a death wish. Unless you take along adequate security with you."  
"A death wish?" replied Lapis. "I wouldn't say that. Actually, what you're proposing isn't half a bad idea. So long as you take along adequate security with you."  
He bit his tongue. Jasper, despite the fact that she was still a hopeless case of introversion even with all the work Steven had been doing with her these past 2 years, would be the definition of adequate security. She looked the part, would do the part, and would most of all feel the part.  
"A few Rubies would sound nice, I guess" was all Steven said.  
Now, all that was left was to work out the scheduling, which would be one of the hardest issues. He'd not only have to find a way to fit an audience of a hundred or more...he'd also have to get it past whoever hed 'd have to ask, or, better yet, find an open, public space. And, considering he'd be doing this all the way from Beach City to the capitol out west, along with more cities across the country if he had the time and things didn't turn from bad to worse until then, he had more to do.  
All in all, it was the day before Thanksgiving, with Connie joking relentlessly how it was "Thanksgiving Eve", by the time the first speech came. Steven decided to take it slow again and present in the space occupied by humans closest to the Gem settlement. He didn't have much experience with speeches, but he had to. If he was going to be himself, if he was going to be half-human and half-Gem, then he was going to have to have some sort of political significance, even without all the tensions rising. And if he was going to be at least a marginally important local political figure, he was going to have to master the art of speaking loudly and clearly, channeling all the emotions he wanted to channel, all while surveying the crowd and making sure to improvise, or surge ahead, depending on their reactions.  
All of this he failed miserably at during his first time, but it was for the better than the worse. He doubled back when he should have gone full speed ahead, gone quiet when the crowd would've roared in applause for him if only he'd put one more emphasis on one more word.  
But that didn't stop most everyone except for Connie, who was in the process of running her own political significance through her head, from cheering Steven on, even one in the upper middle class telling him of his "forensic prowess".  
But by the time he went to sleep, calling his family one more time before they did, he wasn't running through "forensic prowess", or even what his political significance would mean should this become an international issue instead of something beyond the capitol and the eastern area of Maryland. Even beyond tristate. It was a panic for him. He'd been exposed to intergalactic affairs, but never something entangling the whole of his own planet.  
Even that he wasn't running through.  
He was running through why he was made like this. How he maybe wanted a different lot in life, and why couldn't he be something different, and why he couldn't be a teenager who'd just graduated high school and was starting his freshman year in college.  
This was why he loved Connie. The more you spent time with her, the more she grew on you with her understanding.

Thanksgiving came and went, but it didn't go as completely quiet. For the first half of the gathering, Steven hid from his more Gem-hating relatives and started planning one of his speeches, only coming out when a discussion upchucked to an argument between one of the relatives and the Gems.  
Uncle Andy, pilot hat and all, although a little frustrated at him not being able to land at the local airport because of the recent protests, had started from asking a question to having one of his brothers take up the question and somehow regurgitate it as something the Gems were doing that were inferior to humans.  
Religion. They'd had the overwhelming sense to switch to religion first.  
"And what, Christianity doesn't matter?! WE don't matter?! Just because we believe in one God?!"  
"No, no, that's not what we said at all!" Amethyst cried out. "All we said was that we think having more than one god is more believable than just having one! That's all! I swear-"  
Garnet interfered a little too late. "Amethyst. Let me handle this." She threw a glance at Steven; Steven nodded, a signal to him that whatever came out of Garnet's mouth would've come out of his. "We aren't saying that any belief is any more or any less true or important than the other. We were trying to educate Andy. That's all."  
"What're you trying to say now?!" exclaimed Andy's brother. Andy looked at him, eyes wider than the length of his plane's propeller. "You trying to say that Christianity isn't any more important than whatever strange thing you believe in? You're the one that fell away from us! You can't treat us like this!" Andy dragged a finger across his throat, even looked back at the rest of them and offered to take his brother out.  
"Take me out?!"  
Steven had to get in the way of his pounce, but couldn't stop Andy's brother from knocking off Andy's hat. Steven felt a few bruises come up on him, and he winced before summoning his shield. He knew all he had to do was absorb the blows. Each and every one. Eventually, Steven knew he'd tire himself out.  
Eight or so minutes later, Andy and his brother both eased themselves out the door. Steven slammed it, panted a little before locking it. Spinel sat, eyes wide and body a bit curled in on the couch cushion, although she couldn't decide whether it was out of terror or fascination at something new.  
"I…"  
It was Pearl who stepped up first to him. Everyone else seemed to be taken over by the quiet. The waves made their crashes near the back of their house, tried to convince anyone to say something before doubling back and starting it all again.  
"I'm sorry, Steven."  
He took a breath. Another. The weight of two worlds crashed on his forehead. But it was invisible; as long as that constant was there, no one else would have to know.  
"I am, too."  
The rest of the night was spent putting away the food and organizing a plan. Steven wouldn't have to go alone to his speeches, or stuck with a few Rubies or Quartzes he barely knew. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl offered to go with him, and they'd be what they were before, just four friends on a journey together, all trying to get the same thing done, and what a beautiful, golden journey it was going to be.

The 26th, however, was much better than Thanksgiving. They all decided that they'd had enough of the protesting and wanted to go out as a family. By the time breakfast was done and over with, they'd come to a sort of consensus that they'd visit a mall. Not something small, somewhere where they could be easily targeted. Somewhere that took a considerable, but still a not-too-far drive. Somewhere like Charm City, whose mall was a town of its own and extended six some-odd miles. Somewhere where they could easily dart somewhere else if their plans suddenly changed. Something that was silly, even stupid at the heart of it, but a kind of stupid that was somehow above all the stupidity going on around them.  
An hour later, they were there, with lunchtime a little around the corner. None of them were used to the amount of cars crowding every single nook and cranny, the amount of people, so many people, walking here and there. None of them were used to the different types of people or the fact that none of these different types of people reacted to them any more than they'd react to themselves. And none of them, none of them, in all the different kinds of foods and languages and celebrations and layers of people and cars and buildings, would have pounced on Uncle Andy.  
They decided that the best thing to do, as even Garnet's head swam with the amount of crowds rippling here and there, an ocean of all its own, was to stay together, at least for the moment. They looked at the brochure, while Greg stuttered over which place looked good and which place didn't. Spinel was practically screaming at just how new and bright and strong everything was, which didn't help those trying to plan. Eventually, they decided that the girls would head to the spa, secluded at the top level where the least amount of people were, while the boys would go and find the shoes to replace their falling-apart ones. Maybe they could find ones with a halfway marine design on it so they could blend in later…  
The top would be almost immaculately spaced-out, they imagined. But the trip up was nothing short of hell. The one elevator that existed for the whole mall could fit maybe ten out of the entire hundred-something-odd people that stretched down the hallway, waiting, blocking stores. Pearl and Spinel got the brunt of this when people tried to enter the store they were blocking, with Steven and Greg having the sense to step back.  
Once they were finally in the elevator, the roar mulled down to complete silence. It took everything in Spinel to keep her curiosity from exploding, and it was Pearl and Greg that kept a constant eye on her and kept her from doing that.  
When they were at the top, the pressure finally stopped on their heads, and they could finally sigh in relief.  
"You okay?" Steven asked Pearl, who looked as if her eyes were about to pop out of her head.  
"Y...yeah." She looked down at Spinel, who looked at her with eyes wide as always, then Connie, then the rest of them. "C'mon, obiety." The universal Gem word for "citizens" or "all of you", better translated into "women". The word stirred up memories of war speeches, of Rose rallying squadron after squadron, and a weight went off of Pearl when him and Greg walked to the shoe store.  
An hour later, the girls were outside and in hysterics at how Connie had tripped, knocked over a trashcan, and had the trash spill onto her, negating the work done in the entire hour. They'd taken a picture of Connie with the trash on her for prosperity. She'd never escape.  
Greg had finished talking to his son on the amount of responsibilities he was taken and just how his pride...his pride spread to the coast, and he was so joyous, and how did he ever deserve him….  
As Greg made his drive back to the Bay Bridge and back out into Delmarva, as the van occasionally groaned and creaked the way it usually did when it was full, as the members of the van turned the creaking into a funny little song, Steven could think of one thing and one thing only.  
Not the song. Not while his eyes were closed, not while he swayed to his own rhythym, not while Pearl took Spinel close to her and told her where things were and where we're good places to go if she were ever lost.  
It was the pictures in his pocket.

November 27, there was no creaking in Steven's bed as he woke up, kissed his still-sleeping wife on the cheek. For a few moments, he just sat there and realized, on a level he didn't acknowledge before, just how beautiful she was. The way her hair was swept, albeit messy, the way the film of sleep was still on her eyes, the way her torso rose and fell, a violin being played. He didn't deserve this, any of this…  
He made another speech with Connie, this time to a more hostile region of Beach City, albeit "hostile" meant "neutral" at this point. Connie had volunteered to go over into more genuinely hostile parts of town, scope it out for later. Some received him with applause, some noticed him flush when he walk off. He wasn't loud enough. He wasn't...captivating enough. In a sense, he wasn't what he was supposed to be.  
His mind took a glance back to his home. Surely, everyone back home would be watching the speech. Greg and Spinel would be cheering on him no matter what the technicalities of the speech were. As for the ones that were with him, Pearl would take Greg and Spinel's route. Amethyst wouldn't notice the technicalities, while Garnet would be keeping her comments silent. If there were small, but ever so mountainous flaws, he wouldn't be able to know. He wouldn't be competent. He wouldn't be what he was supposed to be.  
He'd better be soon enough.

November 28th was when he made the speech in the hostile region of Beach City.  
It was hell. He recognized the people who'd protested his childhood home practically to the ground. He recognized the ringleader, with creamy skin and hair like dirt mixed in with chocolate mousse. But no one was hurt.  
That was all.

November 29th, the rest of the group heard about Steven's escapade in the more hateful part of Beach City. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, who before now had been trying to fend off the crowds whenever Steven would do his speeches, looked as if they were prepared for anything. But Steven knew what preyed just behind their eyes. He knew they were screaming for it to stop, knew that if it weren't for Steven being Steven, if it weren't for Steven's cause being Steven's cause, they'd run along home.  
Almost as if Greg and Spinel heard them screaming, they came.  
They came. Amethyst couldn't help but laugh aloud and give them a hug; Pearl and Spinel pooled their talents and made a midnight-snack dish for the full moon, the yanko bugini, that night, best translating into human languages as "the goddess' eye." They taught Spinel a yanko bugini dance that Steven had known since he was practically a baby and Greg learned in his mid twenties, where Steven would get in the middle of the crowd and spin while having the Gems jump and circle around him, with Steven touching each Gem's hand in an intricate pattern. Sometimes, Greg took Steven's place in the middle of the circle. All the while, the Gems would sing a pounding, leaping, rhyming Gem song about how the moon goddess helped them and how she always would, with Spinel stuttering through the newer Gem dialogue that had evolved while she was in the Garden.  
Amethyst gave him a noogie. He was the one to laugh this time; he looked up at the moon, wondered if it truly cared about him.  
And why it was letting him stay in this political tangle of twine.

From then, things picked up. The 29th, he made a speech slightly west, in Germanland, before a surprise visit from his family the next day, half-purposefully running into them during the grocery store. When the month turned, he let himself go onto Steaktown, in central Delmarva. The second day of the month, he thought it would be best for him to try to leave Delmarva, only doing one more speech in Eastown, the town at the very edge of the Bay Bridge. Lars, Bismuth, Peridot, Sadie, and her spouse Sheph, who'd been married to her a year now, paid him a visit before he was shipped out, with Peridot, the flower girl as always, tossing him a bouquet of roses for good luck.  
It was when he left Delmarva on the third that month that the trouble started.  
He made the hasty decision of settling down in DC. From here, it'd been a little over a month since the gunwoman had made her attack on them, and nobody, Gem or human, had forgotten. Choosing to stay in a hotel near the Gem neighborhood was a double-edged sword- they had a connection to all these Gems, but in order to get into any major, necessary building, they had to trudge through some of the most Gem-hating people they could possibly met. Steven would often physically grit his teeth. The day the Gems wouldn't have to face this was the day Steven could rest.  
The fourth of December was probably the best of all- he'd gotten his computer hooked up so he could videocall his family.  
The fifth to the eighth of December was when he made his slew of speeches. The first was greeted with cheers and screams of glee back at home from his family, it being right next to the Gem neighborhood. The second had a mix of cheers and jeers, while the third…  
The third had no jeers to speak of, but something happened.  
Something happened that made Steven call the venue in Charm City, tell them the speech was cancelled.  
His heart tightened.  
His body went into tumbles  
The world crumpled.  
Because he noticed a group of picketers in the corner, and one of them had a single word on it.  
"Biesmerchy."  
"Death."  
Not only death, but death that was unnegotiable. There was nothing Steven could do. No peace talks, no speeches, no compromises. The battle cry Gems would often say if they were distressed enough.  
"Biesmerchy" was what he repeated to himself, over and over in his head, until he began mouthing it in the middle of the night. "Biesmerchy." "Biesmerchy. "Biesmerchy."


	11. Chapter 11

Afterwards, Steven's mission not to be swayed by that ugly word was thrown off by the waves, soothed by them. The waves turned into Connie's hand stroking through his hair. If she tried to start a conversation with him, he wouldn't have known. Four minutes later, he was fast asleep.  
When he woke up that morning on December the 7th, what he found was his Omnitransmitter, overrun with messages. He was going to shove it off to the side like he did every day, him managing to prop it back on the table every night with the resolution he'd get to it sometime. But with a full month of speeches ahead of him, he decided to go one step further. Since it was a piece of equipment that was expensive even for a Gem, he wouldn't go so far as to demolish it. Instead, he locked it in the spare bedroom's closet and kept the keys on top of the door. Connie didn't mind. Actually, her eyes seemed to light up a little when she saw Steven put the key at the top of the door.  
The next of that month was a flurry of speeches. All the important ones were finished; he didn't dare do another speech on the side of the Capitol that was closest to the humans, let alone to the President that was oftentimes a large cog in the clock of all this trouble.  
December the 9th, where the locations of his speeches made a flank along the Capitol-Maryland border, it was Connie that a group of disgruntled humans decided to attack next, this time towards Connie. Do you know what hell you'll put your children through, they said, and do you know what psychological harms that a marriage of your type will cause them? If you even try for children with Steven, one of them, a well-educated, otherwise soft-spoken man said, then you'll die!  
Are you even human? cried out a group of ten or twenty of them, three or four of them raising up a sign saying the same thing.  
Are you human?  
Are you human?  
The cry rose up, rose like the sun did in its musty way on the Capitol's shoulders every morning.  
She looked at Steven. Steven looked back at her, his hands practically shaking on the makeshift podium.  
And before Steven knew it, the love of his life was kissing him, and he was kissing her, and she was there and he was there, and that was all that mattered.  
December the 10th, they did suffer repercussions. But, as Steven would later find out, the kiss was more than a kiss. It weeded out those who did support them and those who wouldn't. And he would later tell Connie that this would divide the two groups even further than they would now. Connie sighed, a sack of flour slumping over, and told Steven that she knew. She wasn't thinking.  
"We aren't thinking. And it's not just because we're eighteen. No one's thinking here, Connie. Not in this game. No matter how much we think we are."  
December the 14th, Connie was about to go off to a more rural area of the town they were staying in, this time moving up the eastern area of Maryland, starting with Delmarva right behind them and forging forward, making their way to the west. From there, they'd make the harrowing decision. Should they go to the North, where they'd be more likely to be tolerated? Or should they go to the South, where it was most needed? In a bundle of irony, going to the South would be taking the high path here.  
"I'm going Christmas shopping, Steven. Trying to beat the crowds."  
Nothing.  
Thinking he was doing another one of his video chats, she walked closer to his room. As much as Steven teased her for it, she didn't knock on the door; whoever Steven was video chatting to would want desperately to see her.  
"Steven-"  
Everything in her tensed; the bile skyrocketed to her head, and she almost doubled over, clutching her stomach. But even when the ache passed, the bile wouldn't leave her head. None of this would leave her head.  
The bathroom door was open; Steven was keeled in front of the toilet. Connie could tell from a hundred feet away that he'd used it to hurl in it. He was sweating. So much sweat, so much swear. He twitched a little, then lay still. She sucked in a breath, tried to keep her body from shaking, knew that there was something she had to do. First aid. First aid.  
She put Steven on his side. Should she call anyone?  
"Steven!" She didn't mean for it to be a scream. "Steven!"  
She shook his shoulders back and forth. Nothing.  
No. No.  
She noticed the pink glow around his navel and knew. She let out a sob, a single sob, thanked everything and everyone.  
When they were kids, Steven'd had a conversation with Connie over the same guard rail that was put in after Amethyst took her infamous tumble. Lion was playing fetch with her. Amethyst had done a surprisingly good job of keeping the frisbee close enough to where Lion's head wouldn't barge into the two of them while they were talking.  
But it wasn't Lion's head that was the problem.  
His tail grabbed onto Steven's waist. Before a half a second was over, Steven was tossed backwards and let go by the tail. His head had hit the guardrail before his eyes fell shut and he slid and fell. The rock that'd cracked Amethyst's gem hit Steven's right arm, and it bent like a bat's wing before he settled motionless into the sand.  
That day, just about all of them discovered what Steven called his "generator when it snows real hard"- in other words, what kept him alive when his human half, the primary breathing in and breathing out, was in danger. In danger, not dead. Not nonfunctioning. Only malfunctioning. The gem pulsated, kept breath going in and out of his lungs and his heart beating the way that it was supposed to. No hospital would need a life support system as long as the Gem was functioning; it was what replaced the regeneration properties in full-blooded Gems, kept it blended with his human body. Blended with something more than a hologram.  
Steven was rushed to the hospital that day. At first, that was what Connie thought she should do to Steven now as he lay in front of the toilet. But her fingers shook. Her fingers shook as she dialed 911, wondered if and how they'd discover it was Steven they were coming to pick up, if they'd turn tail and go back to the hospital as soon as it occurred to them that he was half of one of them.  
She knew she was alright now. At least halfway. The operator was trained to find out what was wrong with Steven much quicker than Connie was. All the thinking wouldn't be up to her. In a matter of two minutes, she was instructed to take off Steven's jacket so no one else would be contaminated.  
" Contaminated with what?" she asked, although it tiptoed on a yell. "With what?"  
"Arsenic, ma'am."  
Arsenic. Oh, God. How could she not see this coming? How could she and Steven have thrown themselves headlong into this without reading any of the dangers? They saw them. They skimmed them. But they never read them. The road ahead was much brighter than that. Too bright to see the thorns.  
"The chef!" she almost yelled, the tears in her throat the only thing holding her back. "It was the dam chef!"  
She was instructed to sit Steven up so he wouldn't choke, rinse his mouth should he accidentally swallow any more. She noticed tears. She dried them off, too, and she let her own fall.

When Steven woke up at the hospital hours later, his stomach pumped and unpleasant, it was Spinel's hand that was holding his to the point of tingling.  
"Hey, Waffles." He was surprised he'd remembered that.  
The biggest smile in the world went on her face, and after half-squealing, half-saying his name, she took him in a hug big enough to make his back ribs start being sore.  
"Nice to see you, too."  
She'd grown. She'd grown so much, and Steven had missed it. She was reading human books, listening to human music, learned not to use her stretchiness when she was in public. She'd visited all the tourist attractions Beach City had to offer while laying low and sticking with the other Gems so Greg wouldn't be in danger. She hadn't had a burst of outrage in over a month according to Pearl, and that had been when she and Garnet were sharing memories and war stories of Rose. Thinking that Spinel didn't deserve as much of a dose of grief as they were getting, they'd sent her to her room. Little did they know how much it'd backfire.  
He missed it all.  
He had to stop.  
No, not stop. He had to slow down. If he didn't, he may lose his life, both in a literal sense and whatever sense his head and heart came up with.  
As he came out of the hug and Spinel sprang up out of her seat to make a phone call to the rest of his family, he looked around. Looked at the sign. He was back near Beach City now. Most definitely in Delmarva.  
Even without the waves, seagulls still flew. Still teased him. He could still smell home in the air.  
He could slow down here.  
He had to slow down here.

After Christmas, he decided. On Saint Stephen's day, he decided. After that, he'd leave. He'd have a little over ten days with them, and that was all. He was staying for the holidays, that was all. Neither he nor Connie were abandoning their political life. Connie brought this up to him, tired dinner-plates under her eyes, and told him how she was planning to spend the holidays with her family in lieu of Steven's. He nodded, and with a heaping pan of dhanu muan and a kiss that lasted a long while, she was off.  
The first day he and Connie came back, Greg and Steven talked for a long, long while. Didn't talk about how Steven hadn't done a gig with him lately, but that Greg had scheduled at least 3 as soon as Steven announced he was staying at home for the holidays. Talked about life and love and how complicated all of that was. Talked about how poor Pearl was beating herself up for how she was feeling about Greg, and how Greg was doing his best to stop it. Greg thought that everything he did made it worse. But there was one thing that stuck with Steven for at least the rest of the day.  
"We were out of food, so we got some on the way to the grocery store." He had a small, goofy little smile on him that Steven was in we with; it probably hadn't appeared on his face since before Steven was born. "It was so stupid. When she stepped out of the car, she saw how this one sedan parked between two spaces. And she started laughing. The simplest thing. But the way she laughs… the wind, it can't stop it…"  
His childhood bedroom. He hi-fived the same Mr. Universe poster he'd hi-fived since he was tall enough to do it. He looked at it, looked at all the way things were arranged. Other than what he'd taken with him, his father hadn't changed a thing. He even took a tour to look at all the stains that had accumulated over the past fifteen or so years. The memories struck him, and he was knocked down to the bed. It was too big to squeeze up small apartment stairs.  
The tears flowed with no reason, no origin. The smell, even the smell. It was something that wouldn't ever leave him.  
For awhile, he was a child.  
But only for awhile.  
He wished he could've been for longer.  
But only for awhile.

Garnet must've come in in the middle of Steven's nap. He knew by the way part of his sheets were tucked in perfectly by Pearl, and then only halfway ruined on the other end.  
He also knew by the note that was left by the side of the dresser.  
"We're all worried about you. But whatever decision you decide to make, we'll support it. Or at least I will."  
Steven chuckled a little and headed downstairs.

That late afternoon, after conversation after conversation of how Steven's political life was doing so far other than him being poisoned with arsenic by the hotel chef, Spinel told Steven of how quickly she was catching up to human technology.  
"It sucks," she said. But then she giggled. "But I like it. Something charmin' about it."  
"How often're you on there?"  
"I dunno. An hour a day, maybe? I'm learning really quick. Although Greg told me that with my reputation, it wouldn't be the smartest idea for me to get a social media account." She shrugged at him, then stretched herself so her top half was sticking out the door while her bottom half was still sitting in the seat. She cupped her hands around her mouth. "I CAN STILL MAKE A FAKE ACCOUNT, MR. GREG!"  
"WHAT?"  
"I SAID, I CAN MAKE, A FAKE, ACCOUNT!"  
"NO!"  
Spinel made a little sigh, and by the time her top and bottom half were at the same. By the time Spinel looked at Steven, he was a little pale.  
She made a little giggle before almost slapping herself for it. "Sorry, Steven. I don't do that as often. Just when it's convenient."  
Steven could've told her about why Greg said "no". About the amount of danger Spinel would be putting him in, about the IP that could easily be detected by hackers no matter how anonymous she'd made it. But he didn't. Instead, he, knowing what kind of trouble she could get into by putting herself out to the world, dashed to his room and came back with two tiny machines that played the game "Doom the Darkness", Steven and Amethyst's favorite.  
"What do you even do on here?" She tapped the screen.  
"It's a bit tricky, but I think you'll get the hang of it. You have these buttons to move, this button to fire, this button to start the game, and THIS one to activate your cloaking device."  
"Cloaking device?"  
"Yeah, makes your ship invisible."  
"Yeah, I know. I had that feature on my injector. I'm just wondering why that button's so big here."  
Steven got a chill right in the middle of his spine. "Spinel, this isn't an actual ship."  
"It isn't? It looks a little weird."  
"No, this is like a game of pretend."  
Her eyes lit up like firecrackers, and Steven couldn't help but chuckle and put a hand on her shoulder. "Here, you pretend to be the ship."  
Steven was particularly interested to see her reaction once she died for the first time. She made the quietest yell Steven could remember and gripped the carpet before taking a breath and starting again.  
"That it, Spinny?"  
Okay, that was a little cruel.  
"Sorry."  
"S'okay, Steven. I need stuff like that sometimes. Helps me fight against it harder."  
After the third time, however, she got the hang of it. She even loved how it mirrored old Gem aerial tactics of evading bullets from tens or even hundreds of ships while fighting back with a single one, which is why Steven loved it so much in the first place. She even got past the fifth level without getting hurt, but was obliterated the sixth one.  
"S'okay, Spinel. I played this thing for five years before I beat level six."  
"Yeah, but you were a kid."  
Steven smiled, almost said, "So are you."  
. By the time Steven played the game again to see if his grown-up, chubby fingers were good enough to beat level eight, Pearl walked into the room.  
"Four hours. She was on that computer for four hours when she first went on it, Steven. I don't know what to do with her!"  
Steven and Spinel couldn't help but laugh, and if only Steven was alien enough to transcend, or at least freeze, time.

Two days later on December 17th, just before lunchtime, Garnet started shifting back and forth, obviously in discomfort while Greg fried up some hotdogs and Pearl tried to make a sugar crystal sculpture nearby that'd be "too good for them to eat" when she was done.  
"Garnet? You okay?"  
"Sure I am." Two voices. Steven was almost thrown back in her seat, while Pearl looked back and said a sad little "she does that sometimes" before going back.  
"It's...pretty clear that you're not. Want to sit down?"  
Steven tried to make a resolution that whatever problem Garnet was having, he wouldn't fix. But that became harder and harder the more the seconds passed, and immediately, his resolution barreled out into the Atlantic outside like a message in a bottle.  
"How's the whole….'unnatural' thing?"  
Garnet cringed. "It's not getting better."  
Spinel had to smile at Garnet's clipped-off "t"s, and it was the first time Steven had even noticed them at all.  
"Seems that they hate that part of mnas more than they do mnas itself."  
An effortless fusion, an allegory. The word for "me" or "I" in Gem was "mnie", while the word for "us" in Gem was "nas". They were blended easily into "mnas" shortly after Gems discovered they could fuse hundreds of thousands of years ago. "Me" and "us". "I" and "we". "Mnas. ¨ She only used it when she was emotional. And Steven hadn't remembered her using that word since he at least first moved out to the Capitol.  
"And how did…" Steven looked behind him, saw a cream-colored woman watch them at the edge of the property line, looked on sternly and waited until she walked away. "And how did they find out?"  
"I...I don't know. Maybe the-"  
She suddenly stood up to her full height, backed down a little when she saw how frightened Steven was.  
"The wedding, Steven. At least fifty humans were there. And it's not like we knew they were all supportive. Not like your dad or Lars or Sadie. Any one of them could've been there under cover, and they could've told everyone they knew."  
She covered her forehead with both hands. Steven gasped a little, and it was only when Garnet saw them both when she took a breath, tried to articulate something useful from that crowded-to-the-fire-marshal's-wits'-end that was her mind.  
"We want to move somewhere. Both of us. Anywhere. Not here. You see these people, they think that biology's all there is to it. They think that anything else is unnatural. This species doesn't even need population, even they have released their own papers-"  
"Hey. Garnet? Garnet. Look at me."  
Nothing from her.  
He knew not to put his hands on her shoulders, but he tapped a hand to the left frame of her visor, and it seemed to have the same effect.  
"You are not unnatural. Love isn't unnatural. What you have is just as natural as what...Connie and I had." He didn't dare to venture into "whLook at you! You're a rock! Two rocks! You're the most natural thing there is!"  
She made something in between a grunt and a wince, looked towards the ground.  
"And besides all of that. You know what rocks also are?"  
"Strong." No hesitation. "All of us are."

Well, I guess I'm only halfway strong, then, thought Steven. Oh, well. It's been like that since forever.

December the 19th, Amethyst was searching. When Steven was falling asleep that night, he could hear her tapping, tapping, tapping. He smiled and made a little chuckle-wheeze. Amethyst was always so thoughtful, when it came to Christmas presents. Not with anything else, through. But Steven thought he was at first hallucinating when he woke up at three in the morning. Other than the routine pattering of the waves that had swept into his mind at a young age enough for him to always be able to fall asleep to it- wait. Pattering. That didn't sound right.  
The sound was coming out of Steven's room. He stepped out of his bed before subconsciously putting a hand on the Mr. Universe poster. He squinted in the slightest amount of disappointment as he realized the tapping was more typing from Amethyst's computer in her room. At first, he thought she had something to hide, but Steven noticed the clearly open door and her silk-and-cotton hair being lit by the computer while she brushed it back every so often.  
There was one problem: Spinel's door was open, too.  
Spinel was covering herself with her pillow, her eyebags drooping to the ground. "Why's sleep hafta be so hard, Stevie? I haven't gotten a lick of sleep…"  
"Shhh." Steven put a hand on her cheek and moved down, brushed her pigtails, and she felt the need to close her eyes again after a few times. "I know sleeping's still new to you. And you might not have known this, but sleep works better when your room is quiet. So… close the door before you go to sleep, okay?"  
Steven felt...cheated. Cheated that he hadn't gotten to play this role for the entire time he was being raised. That he was an only child. Why, because Gems couldn't handle pregnancy like humans could? That cheated them all.  
She nodded, but as Steven moved to leave the room, she said the words that Steven was sure Pearl had been hearing since the first week she'd came here.  
"Don't leave me."  
Something was wrong with Steven. He gripped on the door handle. He tried to walk forward, pushed himself back a little, so it looked like he was jerking in place, or stopping entirely. He was neutralizing himself, and he went into a panic. He couldn't control himself. His movement. His thinking- his thinking wasn't right, either. No, I'm not going to leave her. She obviously needs me, even if she is a little annoying. And besides, how long would it take for her to fall asleep?  
Leave her. She's a drag on you.  
No! Why would I do that?! Why would I think that/?!  
He had to sit down. Had to-he collapsed, banged the back of his upper arm against Spinel's dresser.  
"Steven? Steven, you okay?"  
All of a sudden, a pool of contradiction took over Steven. Was this what it was like to be Garnet? Was her head swimming in these thoughts all the time? Memories of a thousand years bashed his head. Bashed it two times. Three. Four. Five. Six.  
Do it! Do it, Steven, because you did it before!  
I know. I know where this is going. No. I'm my own person now. You know that, right?  
I know. But do it for the sake of your sanity, for the sake of mine.  
It took some more searching, but he found that the voice of him doing it was his mother. A figment of her. Their subconsciousness was sharing, and he was wallowing in all four corners of it.  
No. No, Mom, no, why are you here, Mom…  
He shook, and thoughts were him, and he opposed all of them, and he shook, and he shook, and he fell asleep long before Spinel ever would.

Heart thumping. Thumping. Thumping. Thumping.  
His eyes shot open. After a few seconds, he realized he was still in Spinel's room, the lights turned on and highlighting all the posters on the walls. His dad was staring almost directly into his eyes.  
"Pearl. Pearl, he's awake. You can tell the operator that. You're okay. You're okay, right?"  
"Y…." he couldn't say the full word yet. Not now. He shut his eyes again before he tried to sit up.  
Pearl practically yelled as she tried to force his legs still, but as Garnet and Amethyst pulled her off, Greg just moved the door so that Steven could more easily get his balance and sit up.  
"You okay?" Greg repeated.  
He blinked. He blinked again. Saw the looks on all their faces and looked at the ground in order to avoid them. Then, he laughed.  
"First the arsenic, then this." His laughing grew louder. "Man, can't you guys buy me a LifeAlert?"  
Most of them at least smiled. Only Garnet sighed, said, "He's fine," and left. But the space whe opened led his line of vision to Spinel at the edge of the bed, looking down.  
"Why were you all panicking?" Steven asked as he slowly shuffled his way to his feet.  
"Because you were." Greg helped him up, and Steven didn't object.  
"What? No, I wasn't! I was just thinking something that my mom wouldn't, that's all!"  
Pearl piped up . "You weren't just ...panicking, Steven. You were full-on convulsing."  
"Pearl." His father's exhausted voice this time. He sighed. "It wasn't full-on convulsing. He was just twitching once every few seconds or so. If it weren't for it happening so often, it may as well have been muscle spasms from staying up so late all those nights working on speeches." He patted his shoulder before Amethyst came around.  
"Steven?"  
"Yeah?"  
He was so tired. So tired, and he let his arms slip to his lap, his lap slip to the bed, his body following it.  
"You know what I was doing tonight, right?"  
He shook his head, grabbed a pillow and pushed his cheek against it.  
"I was seeing if there was a Gem army anywhere I could apply to."

All the family could do was hope that nothing was buried in Rose's conscience more than she'd already revealed it to be.  
And Spinel always had trouble sleeping once she realized how much Rose had thought of her.

He always remembered Christmas. Remembered the way his father would always joke about how the day didn't matter and that tomorrow was Saint Stephen's Day, even if his days of being too overly Christian with his family were at least decades behind him.  
He remembered the way the winter always turned on its end and the way the sky would always have its way of changing. The moon would lengthen and brighten, and since he was a child, he'd have the impulse late at night, after every present was unwrapped and after almost every guest had left the house, to shout out, to put on all of the jewelry that had belonged to girlfriends his father'd left behind a long, long time ago, and to half-dance with the women in the house under the moon in the backyard celebrating a Moon Goddess he didn't necessarily believe in.  
Then again, he felt as if he'd never be able to do more than half of anything.  
He'd received Connie's present… a book that appeared to be on public speaking until he read it and realized it was a different book altogether, a compilation of superhero comics dug up from the back of the publishing house the comic was originally in. He'd read it all Christmas morning, putting every attempt on his life, every speech, every stress from both sides of him before his father called his name and it was almost lunchtime.  
As they all gathered in front of the Christmas tree, Garnet was still trying to explain to Spinel what a Christmas was and why people gave items to each other without anyone meriting them.  
"But why during the middle of winter?"  
"Because that's when humans first decided it to be."  
"And why is there a picture of a baby in a...wooden house?"  
"It's complicated. But it's because of your dad and what he used to be, and it's because the local store had nothing else good for sale because just about everyone here is what your dad used to be."  
She covered her mouth, adjusted her visor to make sure it covered her eyes enough. "What Greg used to be."  
Spinel didn't seem to notice. "And why is the tree not made of cryo-infused chloromatter? It'd be a lot cheaper, not to mention more efficient."  
Her face was stone. "I'm not Pearl. Don't ask me."  
Spinel frowned a little and looked towards the ground, and Garnet tried to touch her shoulder in an apology before Spinel turned back around, laughed in mischief, and sprang out of the way to look for any presents that may belong to her. Garnet couldn't help but chuckle twice; once for what'd happened with Spinel, and twice for her being the only one she could know who could send a gift to herself without it being considered cheating.  
Steven chuckled as he finished opening his first present, but as soon as he tugged the golden wrapping on the second one, Pearl made the mistake of turning on the TV in search of one of the Christmas specials.  
On the way, she found a news channel with one headline.  
"NEW STATE ORDINANCE INVOLVING THE PROTECTIVE SEPARATION OF HUMANS AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL BEINGS TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN THE NEXT HOUR."

Over the next hour, everyone had their own reactions. There was Greg, who only repeated, "I knew it" before laying out maps of the town. There was Pearl, who screamed and locked the doors and shut the windows, even one of the chairs and barred the back door with it. Garnet guarded the front and kept lookout, saying things only Ruby would say once in awhile. Spinel didn't know what to do. Didn't know how she was going to handle her separation from Greg, and for a moment Steven could've sworn he saw her tears lengthening.  
Only Amethyst contributed her possible battle strategies. Vantage points to take down the human officials when they arrived. The lightpad was not an option, as they didn't know how many were guarding the one out in the gem sect of Beach City. Going out of state, to Delaware up north a half an hour away, was their best bet, they concluded. But how to get away, they wondered? They could use the ocean as a possible escape point, but the only thing Greg had was a sailboat that would leave them sitting ducks for the hour it would take to get all of them out of sight.  
But the van…  
Greg knew back roads to take, eroded from some of the collective remnants of Hurricanes Dorian, Edouard, and Fred that had whiplashed their way up there. No way the authorities would risk taking that road unless they had to. And they only had to if they saw them. The van could fit all of them easily. It was hiding them that was the problem…  
Greg's gears went into overdrive as he sprinted to his garage, not taking Amethyst with him. He rustled through pile after pile and took dimmer, which looked like blinds with spots all over them and a giant Thomas the Tank Engine plastered on it. He'd put them in to keep the sun out of Steven's eyes when he was younger. One quick "haven't gotten the money to buy another one, and besides, these work fine" and he wouldn't be questioned. Everyone would have to stoop down and lay on the floor in a semi dogpile. For space purposes, Spinel was a little too eager to volunteer to poof herself, which resulted in everyone screaming, or at least firmly telling, her not to.  
But as time passed, they looked on with worry at how little space was in the van. If they dogpiled, not only would it be uncomfortable- if someone looked in the window a little too hard or opened the door, they'd all tumble out just like that. So they found a heavy metal rod Steven kept under his bed in case an intruder came. Garnet, the only one with the nerve to do it, all had them line up and then clubbed them all on the head with it once, hard enough for her to end up with a handful of very valuable, mostly intact gemstones in her hand and nothing more.  
She was rushing them all down to the garage, wrapped in a bath towel, when she asked the question. "Should we tell the others?"  
Everything stopped. If they told them now, they'd only have fifteen minutes or so to evacuate. And enough people running around trying to evacuate meant they'd all be spotted.  
But if they didn't, could they live with themselves?  
After the texts made, Steven wondered if he could live with himself as Garnet asked him to hit her again with the rod.  
"Please." Tears came from her top eye, pouring, and dripped from one of her bottom ones; she clutched her head and tried to sit up. "I didn't hit myself hard enough."  
Steven grimaced, shut his eyes. He raised it into the air, and everything in him whipped around in a tornado, stopped as Greg grabbed his brother's left-behind hunting rifle- for self defense in case they came across more violent authorities- and did the job. Two more valuable gems appeared on the floor.  
"Oh, my God."  
Greg shook as he put the rifle down. Steven ran towards the garage door, pushed the button to lift the door. Now that they weren't needed, he put back the decade-old Thomas the Tank Engine blinders.  
"Steven. Steven, I shot her. Steven…"  
He crumpled onto his knees, trying to catch his workseat as he went down.  
Steven grabbed the gems, stuffed them all into the glove compartment. By the time he came back, Greg had already stuttered halfway across the garage, putting up his hand when Steven offered to drive. Greg turned off the tracking device on his phone along with Steven and backed out of the garage.  
"I know someone up in Rehoboth. We can stay there, Steven."  
"In one of the beach houses?" Steven jostled along with the van as it set out on the half-sand.  
"Yeah. It's not the best, but it's our best shot. We don't know the landscape there yet. But it's gotta be better than here, Steven. It's gotta."  
The trucks. They were designed to look like cattle cars; that was apparent to both humans there. They hoped it was for intimidation purposes only. A bad sign. A bad sign...  
"Go, Dad! Go!"  
He regretted it as the van's jostling confused his seatbelt, and it tightened over his chest the point of him coughing as he jostled some more. Greg muttered something about the alignment before going up towards the state line.  
Twenty minutes passed. Suddenly, the glove compartment expanded to four times its size There was a horrible screaming sound from the glove compartment. Ruby's voice. Then another poofing noise before Steven could interfere, and Ruby was back in her gem.  
"Ruby, oh, G-" Steven grabbed the barf bag in the pocket behind the seat and vomited.  
"She must've been the one Garnet missed the first time" was all Greg said before he gripped harder onto the steering wheel, realized that there was someone in front of him on the beach, swerved to the right.  
Steven shuddered, looked out to the waves as they threatened to creep up from the shoreline and nip the edges of their tires. He gripped the bag in his hand. "How close are we to the state line?"  
"Almost there. Almost there, Steven, okay? Just hold on. Stay with me, all of you."  
Steven made plans in case there were guards blocking the state lines, in case they'd formed a plan far before their family did, which was most likely the case considering the state was the entity that had the ordinance released in the first place. Greg did his best to look disheveled, look like he was lost, disoriented. Steven suggested Greg distort the truth a little, say he was visiting family up north. Greg nodded, and when they approached the touristesque sign indicating where the border was, Greg saw guards out of the corner of his eye, but as the van slipped past the sign, both father and son could feel the guards' eyes training on them.  
"We made it. Oh, God."  
Five minutes passed by before they saw the sign indicating where Rehoboth began, a town almost identical to Beach City, except entirely with a human population and only ever hearing stories of what was going on. Greg pulled onto the road away from the sand with one huge jolt, and Steven opened the glove compartment.  
Spinel came to, clutching her head in near-agony for the slightest of seconds, as soon as Greg sat down on the bar at the back of the van.  
She took a look around, almost tasted something wrong in the air. "Where are we? It doesn't look like we're out of Mary's-land or whatever it's called."  
Greg didn't move; he'd taken ahold of his own head. Spinel put an arm over his shoulder.  
She looked at the open glove compartment and the thousands of dollars worth of gemstones inside, found she couldn't stop.  
"You remember?"  
Steven felt a shudder as he looked back at her, although it could've been the now nonexistent wind.  
"Remember what?"  
"When you-"  
The both of them were silent for the next half a minute. Greg had now come off the back of the van, causing the whole thing to shift so slightly that you couldn't tell it happened unless you were physically touching the van's floor.  
"When I poofed them?" She buried her fingers in her hair, messed it up. The thought occurred to Steven that the first thing Pearl would do when she came back was fix it. "Kinda. It's...foggy. I remember that, but then I remember getting cut in half."  
"Yeah." Steven chuckled, scratched the back of his neck. "Sorry."  
"It's alright. I was attacking you first, after all. I don't think there's anything anyone could do to say that what I did was alright. Even anything I could do."  
She sighed, and Steven knew that sigh more than anything.  
"But I do remember."  
A tear trailed its way down her cheek. Steven reached out to dry it, halfway out of instinct. Spinel jerked away a little at first, but then sighed and let Steven wipe it away, wipe away the next one. His hand stayed there until both were sure that she was done.  
"I do remember."  
_


	12. Chapter 12

(Note: Season Six finale; Season Seven starts at the next chapter.)

After what must have been ten once-overs to see if there were any leftover guards from Beach City that had trickled over into Bethany Beach, the area in the middle of Beach City and Rehoboth. While Bethany Beach was, by all means, out-of-state, both Greg and Steven thought it was a good idea to buy themselves a little distance to throw off some of the guards. While Greg called his friend, Steven watched as slowly, each Gem unpoofed. Sapphire was one of the first to. Steven told her that Ruby'd unpoofed early, but didn't have the heart to tell her the details. But Sapphire seemed to catch on; she screamed a little before she clutched the ruby to her chest and kissed it before wrapping it halfway in the folds of her dress.  
Afterwards, Amethyst unpoofed, clutched her head. "When Garnet comes out, I'm going to give her what-for, I swear." She looked at Sapphire holding Ruby, said nothing else.  
Pearl then jumped out, tapped a little at her pearl, testing it by running the same basic analysis she'd done for the past thousands of years since she was first poofed. Some of the only Gem Steven knew, and it meant, "Identification: Pearl-E7314, hailing from Cancri-55E. May the Great Diamond Authority live forever."  
Ruby was still resting in Sapphire's arms and dress by the time Greg said, "It's time to head out. Saph, I'm putting you in the backseat with Ruby, alright?"  
She nodded. "Please don't call me Saph."  
In a matter of a few minutes, they were at his friend's house. It was foreign; that was all Steven wanted to know. It didn't smack of home at the slightest.  
He rang the doorbell. Sapphire was the one to keep a lookout before the ruby in her dress popped back to life. Ruby looked at Sapphire, looked at each hand, disconcerted. But Ruby and Sapphire still ran somewhere where no one could see them before, after moments of indescribable tenderness, Garnet walked back to the front porch.  
As Steven stepped inside, he realized how familiar Randy was. When he was a kid, he thought, he first saw him. He was Irish, undeniably. Red hair. Short. Everything. But he also looked like he went to the gym. He realized- and the world ever so slightly crumbled on him- that this was the reason that his dad blushed when he went near him. Steven remembered Greg telling him how he really felt around both most women and some men, although that seemed so long ago...  
"Nice to see you, Randy." Greg was about to step closer to him, but looked at Pearl; Steven could detect a little nervousness in it. "Thanks for sharing."  
"Anytime. They're dangerous, most of them. But like I said, any friend of Greg's is a friend of mine."

Connie didn't waste any time heading over to Rehoboth from her parents' house. In order to keep themselves from crowding Randy's house any more than it was already, both Steven and Connie thought it was best to take up their nomadic life again.  
They had to do speeches now. They couldn't afford not to.  
So the Omnitransmitter was, as always, tossed away. Spinel looked on with a little hatred as Steven and Connie left, but took it in like a punch to the stomach and went back to the door. Except this time, Steven made a real, verbal, tangible promise that he would come back. Like he always would.  
There couldn't be any time wasted. And so, without any trace of doubt, him and Connie set out on the road, this time trying to find a way back to the Capitol without going into Maryland. At least for now. But after awhile, Connie piped up with her idea of boarding a plane instead, but to her dismay, all of the airports were in Maryland. So they painfully found a way to snake to the Capitol, taking a few days to weave their way around by heading all the way up to the top of Delaware and to the tip of southern Pennsylvania. They then snuck their way west until they hit West Virginia. After heading down to about Elkins, it was a straight shot east across I-66 in Virginia until they found their way, finally, in the Capitol. It was the middle of January by then, and him and Connie figured that the speeches would last all the way until the end of the month. Then, hopefully, things should have died down about this law.  
The first speech was met by rousing applause. More than that, even. There was even cries of, "Jarilo! Jarilo! Jarilo!" by some of the Quartzes.  
War. One of the few words in Gem he was ever taught.  
Rather than shouting for quiet, he put up his hand. It took a half a minute, but soon, all was quiet. He had to wait until all was quiet; otherwise, whatever he said would be lost in conversation after conversation, and possibly, if he waited too soon, a few more "Jarilo"s.  
When the silence finally swept over the Capitol, a wave over Steven's chilled back when he was taken there as a baby.  
Three. Two. One.  
Liftoff.  
All improv from here.  
"Gems. Gems of all types. Obiety. Women.  
No matter what role you served in Homeworld, we have one role now. And that role is to protect this world for the interest of both species; when one species dies, we all die. I see humans' souls die every day with this new law. And I tell you that when your soul dies, when your soul is separated, it is worth as much as a physical death, as a physical separation. And no matter if you understand every word I say or if you must use a translator because you are still in the process of learning this human language, we all speak one language. We all know this language. It lives deep inside all of us.  
And that language says that conflict is not the way. I condone self-defense, by all means. But I am as much human as I am Gem. I am as much them as I am you. By attacking them, you are attacking me. But by defending yourselves, you are defending me. By defending yourselves, you defend your species. By defending your species, you defend both species.  
Defend yourself. Defend all of us. But any more will cause harm. Keep the faith. But keep action."  
But as the speech ended, he still felt a creeping sense come up to him. He didn't know what it composed of. Maybe it was the way the van's walls walked towards him with their two bodies. They took their feet and shuffled a little higher up his shoulders with every move the second hand on his always-rose-quartz watch made until Connie came, laughing, almost tackling him in the hallway.  
"And all impromptu? Man, I should not be as hard with you with your computer use!"  
And for a moment, everything was alright. He exhaled, and a torrent of stress left him. He knew that it was a wave by the salt he tasted in his mouth, only knowing by Connie wiping it away that it was a year. Neither of them were quite sure whether it was out of relief or out of stress.  
In any event, Connie laughed as she finished arranging a safety plan should there be an active threat during one of the speeches, human or Gem. "I had a cut on my hand. Thank you for healing it."

Steven, even with everything his head went through, didn't think he'd ever forget what happened during the second speech.  
By then, it was January 29th. Ruby and Sapphire had unfused in order to renew their wedding vows before fusing again. Spinel had started to notice that her tear marks were shorter, although that came and went with whatever mood her brain decided she'd feel that moment. And Pearl and Greg had gone "alone together to do some things", although almost everyone else saw through it for what it really was. But none of it mattered now that all the other Gems were living under segregation. Segregation. He'd thought he'd never hear the word again, at least not in the country he was in at the moment. The last time he heard that, he was being homeschooled and learning about a time not even his dad could remember.  
He'd decided to do it on the other side of the city, where the highest concentration of humans were. The end farthest from Maryland, with Alexandria right next to it. Heh. Confidence seemed to push the envelope a little too much. Enough for the letter to burst out from underneath.  
And it was more than letters that Steven received once he got there. It was purely volatile, a word that Peridot had taught him before he graduated the middle school level of online courses at home. He could see the signs calling him the same "mutt from Mars" that was etched all over the human buildings near where the remaining Gems were now segregated to along with every other Gem in Maryland.  
But he spoke. And when he spoke, he kept it short. Kept it silent. He suppressed every part in him that was Gem. So it made sense that the speech was half as long as what it should be.  
There was a short hush over the crowd. Steven looked to the left and to the right for immediate danger, pretending to be solemn about it in order to look decent.  
Connie was already waiting for him, and before anyone could react, they'd driven away to the hotel.

Steven realized he had trouble breathing that day. It wasn't because of asthma- him running around on at least over a dozen planets had shaved off a lot of his baby fat, and with that, a lot of his asthma. And it wasn't because of any accidental falls on his chest as he came down the stairs, which is what Connie and him joked about initially.  
He realized it was the same thing that made him shed a tear earlier.  
It was also the same thing that caused him to look out the back window- it was arranged almost exactly the way it was back in their old condo across town- and out the front door almost over and over again. Connie didn't ask him what was wrong with him; she only pulled him into her lap and sighed before stroking the hair she'd always lose her fingers in.  
"What if they come, Connie? What if it'll be just, like, before, and…"  
"Shhh. And we were alright before, weren't we?"  
She took a strand and toyed with it a little before settling her hands down.  
"Yeah, but that doesn't, stop me from…"  
"I know." She took the little area tshirt in between his exposed back and his hoodie, started kneading it.  
Her hands stopped, settled again. The hotel was quiet other than the occasional sound of someone walking their dog outside; the air arond them seemed to hold itself in a breath. It exhaled when the heater kicked in, and the breath exhaled. Steven took another breath, a proper breath, and started to speak.  
"You ever heard of Elvis?"  
"Who hasn't?"  
"I mean, you ever heard of Elvis' story?"  
"Not...I mean…"  
"He loved his mom so much. More than anything-" Tears came. "Sorry, I… you know what he did next?"  
"No."  
"He spent his entire life trying to find a girl to fall in love with him and be like a mom to him at the same tiime. A girl near his age. And he never got it, because no girl wanted somebody who wanted that. And then- then he started drinking, and then he moved on to dugs, and he was a mess, and he ruined his life, and he wanted to die, and I don't wanna be like him. I don't ever wanna be like him, Connie…"  
"Steven…"  
It was the weight of the world that Steven let soak into not only Connie, but anything who wasn't him, slowly.  
And it was the weight of the world that slowly lead him to sleep.

It was the weight of the world that pushed him onward.  
Steven had realized how far he'd gone and decided he'd destress by going to a cooking class with Connie to learn how to cook some of the food she so loved. Oddly specific, but something the Capitol wouldn't be lacking. Since it featured much of Connie's culture, she thought it was best for her to help organize the event. Which is why after a quick peck on the cheek and a quick reaffirmation for the other from both of them, Steven was walking by himself out of the condo towards the building right down the street corner where everything was going on.  
He didn't know the rules. He didn't know you weren't supposed to walk in groups of less than at least five when walking on the sidewalk here, even when going somewhere close. He'd didn't know. He'd been homeschooled in rural Delmarva all his life.  
But he was about halfway there, in the little area on the sidewalk in between a bank and a bakery, when he saw them.  
They'd been toeing his family's property for awhile now. His dad had even pretended to be a tourist in order to see what was going on with them. The leader had red hair, curly just like Randy's. He knew he was the leader because of the way he manipulated himself, used boxes, high places on sidewalks, anywhere in order to make himself appear the tallest. There were others with him, kids that looked a little older than Steven, mentally if not physically. Most had snow-pale skin. And Steven's skin turned pale itself when he saw the shirt that the leader wore.  
"Keep Beach City Mutt-Free."  
Before he knew it, the leader had pinned him down to the floor, was tugging at his navel before Steven could do anything. Muffled by the lack of people and by the leader shoving his face into his own jacket, he screamed in ten seconds of excruciating agony as the piece of diamond was pulled out, tossed to the end of the sidewalk and into one of the sewer grates nearby as his entire core felt like it was lit on fire.  
"No, my...my-"  
Exhaustion gripped him. He felt as if a train were crushing him; he coughed under the weight of it.  
The leader took out a knife, not-so-deftly cut the lef sleeve off of Steven's own hoodie, tied it around Steven's mouth and the back of his neck. Steven clenched his bleeding arm and tried his best to take advantage of the pain-fueled tears. Before he could, the leader took the arm, pinned it back until Steven heard a quiet crack. The tears flooded from his eyes this time, unabridged and unbound, but not falling anywhere they needed to.  
He tried kicking a little despite all the exhaustion, but two others held his legs down. His right arm flailed, now unable to summon any weapons. He shook his head as his body started to shut down.  
In a few seconds, it was all he could do to breathe normally, and he found it too exhausting to struggle.  
"There you are. Human just like the rest of us, aren'tcha?"  
It was all Steven could do to get a better look at him. He prayed that it was a sudden bout of rain that caused his eyes to be blurry this time. The only thing the tears were doing for him now was embarrassing him.  
There were freckles on the leader. Undeniably. He looked like a twisted version of Lars. But those around him were of all different shapes and sizes. They were all wearing some shade of black and had some shade of faded text. They were each fetching something out of their pockets.  
The exhaustion crushed Steven's head, and he winced and dropped his head slowly on the alley floor.  
"Y'know, Steven, December happened a long time ago."  
Steven felt his body slowly fill with a fourth a gallon of waste products that should've been taken out a long time ago, all poisoning him from the inside out, the gem not taking out or putting in what it had to.  
So whatever his human body had to offer tried to fill in the gem's role. His back burned, and so did the top of his stomach. He tried to vomit, found he was too exhausted to.  
He felt his lungs as they tired out. His eyelids fluttered shut over his now jasper-yellow eyes. The amount of venom in the leader's voice only made it worse.  
"But I was at Mass then. And the Gospel the day after Christmas gave me an idea. The person in there had the same name as you. Stephen. Something happened to him there."  
He heard quiet rumble-rattles, tossing sounds from the others. Undoubtedly whatever was in their pockets.  
Rocks.  
He was past confusion. The breath caught in his throat, and he tried as best as he could to move himself towards the sewer grate, but all his body could allow him to do was to make a glorified flinch.  
"And you'd like to live up to your namesake, wouldn't you?"  
And for every day and nightmare afterwards, if Steven was asked if he knew what it was like to be dipped in Hell for those nexxt minutes, he couldn't answer no.  
He didn't know what it was like to be stoned. No one did he knew of. Stoning was something done in the Bible his father read when he was younger. All he knew is that he tried to scream to his shutting-down body to run, run, run, and that was before the first stone.  
The leader had the honor of throwing the first one. Of all places, it hit his chest. He made a horrible noise in between a yelp and a scream, a mixture of both. A mixture. It was what he was. It was a stabbing punch, if he could describe it any better. All the bravado was gone; the tears were squeezed out as if he were a fish being choked of all its water.  
"That feel good? Huh? That's what you've been doing to us. Taking our jobs! Making us poor! Firing my dad and making me poor! Sending more aliens to come down and threaten us! That feel good?"  
No, no, that's not what we're trying to-  
His head was murky with pain. He closed his eyes under the murky sky.  
And that was when the rest of the stones hit.  
His body was lit on fire with these stabbing punches, and he jerked in a terrible dance. The world closed in on him and pierced his human skin with needles, and it was all he could to protect his head.  
The side of his leg unlocked blood it shouldn't have before it was quickly splintered into a million pieces. His collarbone was the next to go. Shattered completely, blood spewing initially. Then his lower back howled as it was bruised. Then his foot, his back again, his stomach, chest...no more words….no more, no more….  
Everything that was human howled at him in mutiny.  
The screaming. The screaming.  
All muffled by the jacket.  
Screaming.  
Screaming.  
Whimpering.  
Gasping.  
Silence.  
Was he dead? He didn't know. Was he not breathing? He wasn't paying attention. But either way, he could feel the blood in his veins as it poured itself into the ground. He could feel his lungs twisting. Filling. What were they filled with? He didn't know. He could hear himself gasping into the sleeve tied around his mouth.  
Both legs broken, his left arm still pinned to his back and breaking with them. Stomach quickly swelling and leaking blood. Chest seizing. His hands and back almost compromised, and one of the youngest ones almost stopped and threw up at the sight of exposed muscle on his hand. The bruises he couldn't count. The cuts, he-  
Connie. I love you so much.  
Dad, I didn't tell you that enough.  
Pearl. Thank you.  
Spinel. Sweetheart, you've come so far.  
Amethyst. I've never seen you as anyone less.  
Garnet. The both of you are unstoppable.  
I never tell any of you any of this enough.  
I never….  
He lay there, dead. Lifeless to the world until, after a few more stones dropped on him for good measure, they shuffled out one by one. And then he heard running before the ringing in his ears started kicking in.  
The ringing. His Gem gone.  
White Diamond, don't- don't- I need-  
He needed it.  
His eyes shot open, coated with yellow. No one was right arm. He knew it wasn't damaged.  
He took a long breath, filled with agony.  
He needed it.  
Without the Gem, the brains he had left were murky.  
He had to… the sewer grate….  
He stretched out his arm, felt like it was being stepped on as he moved it. He let himself yelp before he started dragging himself and his body exploded, some of his leg bones scraping on the sidewalk. His lungs crumpled in on themselves, and within 2 drags, he was exhausted. Whatever progress he made was dampened by his coughing, which only sent his body into more fits of pain. He repeated this process again. One more time. And when he was too exhausted, he tried positioning his right limb under his streaming eyes.  
Each cut was gone.  
The sewer grate lay in front of him, flowing with liquid. There was a trail going in from where he'd dragged himself. There was a puddle a little in the grate, tiny. He could tell that much, although it was getting dark now and he couldn't see what it was. Had his Gem fallen in there? He swiped at it with his hand; it was small enough to where he could hold almost the entire thing in it. He felt something a little heavier than water in his hand. He smiled a little.  
He brought it to where it was close enough for him to see. It was red. Blurry, but red.  
The entire trail was red.  
And there was nothing else he could see in the grate.  
He had to close his eyes. Had to….no, he had to get the Gem, he had to get out of here…  
His eyelids were so heavy…  
I love all of you...  
I never tell any of you any of this enough….  
He let his eyelids fall.


End file.
